Re: Modify Query, or sift through results?

Ah ha..now it looks like we're on to something. I had to modify it a bit, but it worked...for the most part. I had to make it rlike "North[;|$]". But here's the next problem...I have a region 'Midwest' and 'Upper Midwest'. When I do this search for Midwest, I get the 'Upper Midwest' results also. So I tried rlike "[^|;]Midwest[;|$]" which returned no results. If I'm thinking correctly, that should be saying: Find the beginning of a string, or a semicolon, then "Midwest", then a semicolon, or the end of a string. Is that correct? Thanks, Joe Jason Stechschulte wrote: > > 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>