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Asked: 2026-05-19T15:50:29+00:00

I have several columns in my databases with similar names. How do I select

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I have several columns in my databases with similar names.
How do I select those based on the word they start with?
Here’s an example table layout:
enter image description here

I tried selecting all info for a particular thing (food kind in this example) using

$Food = "Vegetable"; 
mysql_query("SELECT `" . $Food . " %` FROM `Foods`");

but it didn’t seem to work.

Any help would be appreciated 🙂

EDIT: Apparently this wasn’t clear from my example, but I already know all column’s first words. The columns are always the same and no ‘food kinds’ are ever added or deleted. The PHP variable is only there to determine which one of a couple of set kinds I need.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s no way to do exactly what you’re trying to. You could do another query first to fetch all the column names, then process them in PHP and build the second query, but that’s probably more complex than just writing out the names that you want.

    Or is there a reason this query needs to be dynamic? Will the table’s structure change often?

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