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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T01:21:11+00:00

I would like to split a column containing a string with article references into

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I would like to split a column containing a string with article references into multiple columns in MySQL. For example, the following string

North American Birds 53(1) 1999: 27-29

would be split into ‘North American Birds’, 53, 1, 1999, 27-19. I know I can do some of this with substring_index, but this will not work for splitting the journal name (North American Birds) from the volume (53). Any idea how I can do that?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use the number as a separator.

    Slow and ugly code, but I guess it works 

    SELECT 
  s.id
  ,SUBSTRING(s.title,1, PosOfFirstNumber-1) as booktitle
  ,SUBSTRING(s.title, PosOfFirstNumber) as Remainder
FROM 
  (SELECT
      id
      ,title
      ,LEAST(
          IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('1',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('2',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('3',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('4',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('5',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('6',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('7',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('8',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('9',title),0),999)
          ,IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE('0',title),0),999)
        )) as PosOfFirstNumber
    FROM table1 ) s
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