Question

I know it is not an appropriate technique to have a structure of MySQL table as such, but I have to work with such. The problem is, that the field in table has value with comma seperated integers, like “1,3,5,7,10” and I want the query to return rows, in which field has a to the query passed number in it, like:

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE '5' IN (`field_in_table`)

However, it does not work, if, in this case, ‘5’ is not the first number in the field.
Any advises, how to solve that?

Thanks in advance,
Regards,
Jonas

Answer 1

Have a look at

FIND_IN_SET

Returns a value in the range of 1 to N
if the string str is in the string
list strlist consisting of N
substrings. A string list is a string
composed of substrings separated by
“,” characters. If the first argument
is a constant string and the second is
a column of type SET, the
FIND_IN_SET() function is optimized to
use bit arithmetic. Returns 0 if str
is not in strlist or if strlist is the
empty string.