Re: concat woes

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 4:34 PM, PJ <af.gourmet@videotron.ca> wrote: > Here we go again! > I'm trying to do some form entry verification and am trying to figure > out how to verify if there are 4 fields entered: > f_nameIN, l_nameIN, f_name2IN, l_name2IN > Verifying for each is ok, but somewhat tortured and long. I thought of > using CONCAT_WS but it doesn't seem to listen to me. > The manual is not very explicit as to where it can be used and by the > examples, it would seem that it can only be used in select statements. > Seems a little silly, no? > Here is what I found so far. > echo $f_nameIN," ", $l_nameIN; > returns joe whatever - ok, fine. > Obviously the string contains something. Right. > Now try this > $Author = CONCAT_WS(" ", $f_nameIN, $l_nameIN); > echo $Author; > and it's a flop. > Am I missing a bracket, curly bracket or a baseball bat? > I thought maybe I should add AS Author - but that only seems to work in > a select statement. :'( > Help? I believe you're mixing your T-SQL with your PHP. Sort of like getting chocolate in your peanut butter, but not half as delicious. CONCAT_WS is a MySQL server-side function. It cannot be called directly from PHP, but rather via a database call performed **by** PHP. Also--PHP has the nifty "dot" (.) operator for concatenating strings. Try this: $Author = $f_nameIN . ' ' . $l_nameIN; echo $Author; Hope this helps, -- // Todd