Question

Let’s say I have the following table:

id    | state | type | my_text
--------------------------------------
12345 | OH    | 01   | blah
12345 | OH    | 01   | testing
12345 | OH    | 01   | hello world
12345 | OH    | 02   | something else
12345 | OH    | 02   | more text

Does there exist a MySQL grouping function that would allow me to output something like this?:

id    | state | type | my_text
--------------------------------------
12345 | OH    | 01   | blah|testing|hello world
12345 | OH    | 02   | something else|more text

I am aware of similar functions for working with numbers (i.e. to calculate the average of a bunch of grouped rows), but I am looking for something that will group together text fields and delimit them. It seems fairly straight-forward, but I cannot seem to find the appropriate way to do this.

Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

GROUP_CONCAT can do this, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-functions.html

SELECT id, state, type, GROUP_CONCAT(my_text SEPARATOR '|')
FROM tbl
GROUP BY id, state, type