note 59503 rejected from function.substr by nlopess

Note Submitter: brad at BradTheissen dot com ---- I not new to programming, but fairly new to PHP (personally, however I have given many others the tools to learn and program PHP for me in companies). I need to do this: In one of my Tables I have a field called 'stars' which contains any number of names, comma delimited (e.g. MarilynMonroe, LizTaylor, JamesDean, SantaClaus) I need to build a $query = 'select ... where stars (contains) one of those names... one at a time, by comparing to a variable $starname which has ONE star's name (e.g. $starname=JamesDean). So i want to do the $query = 'select x x x where stars (contains) $starname so that I will find all records where jamesDean is one of the names in the stars field for that record. Would that be a good use of the STR command on this page, or a different variation of STRxxx ??? Thank you... a direct e-mail response would be awesome as well. THANK YOU!