Question

I wanted to search through multiple rows and obtain the row that contains a particular item.

The table in mySQL is setup so each id has a unique list (comma-delimited) of values per row.

Ex:

id | order
1  | 1,3,8,19,34,2,38
2  | 4,7,2,190,38

Now if I wanted to pull the row that contained just the number 19 how would I go about doing this? The possibilities I could figure in the list with a LIKE condition would be:

19,     <-- 19 at the start of the list
,19     <-- 19 at the end of the list
,19,    <-- 19 inside the list

I tried the following and I cannot obtain any results, Thank you for your help!

SELECT *
FROM categories
WHERE order LIKE '19,%' OR '%,19%' OR '%,19%'
LIMIT 0 , 30

Answer 1

You can use FIND_IN_SET to solve your problem in a simpler way:

SELECT *
FROM categories
WHERE FIND_IN_SET('19', `order`)
LIMIT 0, 30

In general though you should try to design your database so that this type of operation is not necessary.