group_concat contence of column - extracting keywords

BubikolRamios · 02-12-2012, 11:11 AM

say I have this in table

Code:

thing 
real thing

I dont see any easy way to get this out:

'real,thing'

group_concat (distinc field) will not do it. Would give me 'thing, real thing'

Any thought ?

KuriosJon · 02-12-2012, 12:36 PM

Can you rephrase your question? I don't understand what you want to do.

If your table looks like this, what do you want your output to be?

Code:

column_name
--------------
one
two three

BubikolRamios · 02-12-2012, 05:06 PM

in that case:
one,two,three

that is, I want group concat(distinct)
and on top of that distinct words.

Old Pedant · 02-13-2012, 06:27 AM

I don't think there is any easy way to do this in SQL.

There is no easy way for a SQL query to know that the value in one record is a part of the value in another record.

If there truly are only two records in your result set it wouldn't be too hard, but what if there were 200 records?

And KuriosJon asked you what you wanted to get from

Code:

column_name
--------------
one
two three

And you answered

Code:

one,two,three

That's even tougher, as now you are asking SQL to recognize that "two three" is two separate words, split up those words, and then group_concat them back to get the commas between them.

CAN this be done? Sure. Anything *CAN* be done. But it would be a messy Stored Procedure that would probably need to use a cursor.

I think you would be better off just getting "thing,real thing" via group_concat and then using PHP coding to consolidate that down to "thing,real".