Re: Modify Query, or sift through results?

On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 08:54:04AM -0500, Joseph Koenig wrote: > I've got a script that searches a db every night and sends out e-mail if > it finds something a person would be interested in, based on criteria > they gave us. The problem is that I have one field that stores regions > of the country in a very unpleasant way. It stores them as: > > Northeast;West;South > > So all of the regions for one record go into one field. The problem is > that when searching that, if someone has a preference of 'North', I > dont want to pull records that have 'Northeast', as would happen with > the above example. Is there a way to modify the MySQL query so as to > find only 'North', keeping in mind that 'North' may be the 3rd in a list > of semi-colon separated regions? Or do I need to sift through the > results in PHP to clean them up? Thanks, You can certainly have MySQL do the work. I can't modify your query, because you didn't give it to us, but I can give you an example. <?php $sql = select * from your_table where your_column rlike "North(;|$)"; ?> This will do a regular expression match. If either North with a semicolon directly after it or North and the end of the string is found, the row will be returned. -- Jason Stechschulte jpstech@unoh.edu -- If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can. -- Larry Wall in <199709241628.JAA08908@wall.org>