Question

is it possible to use characters instead of a position in a substring function?

SELECT SUBSTRING(title,2) FROM table

puts out every title starting with the second position.

Now I want to cut the output after a space. The space positions varies.
Is it realiseable?

I tried sth. like

SUBSTRING(title,2,LOCATE('',title))

,but for some reason the output was empty.

Thank you in advance.
Soloco

Answer 1

You can use SUBSTRING_INDEX for that:

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(title, ' ', 1) FROM table
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX('hello world', ' ', 1) # gives you 'hello'

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.htm