Question

I have an unusual query, which got me stuck right now

Table Fields are:

id    bigint  20
name  varchar 255
desc  text

There are many records with same name and desc, but desc have some extra spaces in between words

like

1   't1'   'hello world'
2   't2'   'hello                world'

I need to find those rows that have similar data

How can I find these, thanks.

Answer 1

This is pretty close. Assuming:

+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+

| Field | Type    | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| d     | text    | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| id    | int(11) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+

Then this query:

select x.id,x2.id,x.d,x2.d from x left join x as x2 on replace(x.d," ","") = replace(x2.d," ","") and x.id != x2.id having !(x2.id is null);

Gets you the duplicate rows. It fails if you have “Helloworld” (i.e. with no space) and you don’t want that to match.