Question

I have to do some statics from read-only db where value are stored in a weird form

example:
I have 2 rows like

ID    text field 
1     1001,1003,1004 
2     1003, 1005

I need to be able to count that this is “5”.

I don’t have write access so don’t know how to read and count right away without creation a function or something like that.

Answer 1

Clever solution here on SO: How to count items in comma separated list MySQL

LENGTH(textfield) - LENGTH(REPLACE(textfield, ',', '')) + 1

EDIT

Yes you can select it as an additional column: and correcting with the CHAR_LENGTH from @HamletHakobyan’s answer:

SELECT 
  ID, 
  textfield, 
  (CHAR_LENGTH(textfield) - CHAR_LENGTH(REPLACE(textfield, ',', '')) + 1) as total 
FROM table