Question

I have the following scenario:

The user will input an interval and/or single comma-separated number codes for each product.

Partial table example:

name        | codes
-----------------------------------
Product 1   | 239,300-350

Product 2   | 430-450,500,29

Product 3   | 780,2

For example, when the user searches for code 321, it should return the row of Product 1.

Is there a way for doing that search with a single query?

Answer 1

I’d suggest doing this with two tables instead:

products:
 - name
 - id

code_ranges:
 - product_id
 - range_start
 - range_end

Then you can get what you want (for some $input_id) by using a join:

SELECT product.id, product.name
FROM products 
JOIN code_ranges ON products.id = code_ranges.product_id
WHERE code_ranges.range_start <= $input_id
    AND code_ranges.range_end >= $input_id

You can have multiple rows in the code_ranges table for each product to represent multiple different ranges (e.g. 2-4,7-10 would have two rows, one with range_start=2 and range_end=4, and another for the 7-10 range).

A product code that isn’t a range would simply be treated as a range where the start and end are the same (e.g. 7 would be range_start=7 and range_end=7).