Searching from comma separated value

Question

This is one of those \'oh my god\' moments.

The previous programmer in our company has left behind a badly-coded application using PHP and MySQL.

One example

Answer 1

You could use FIND_IN_SET to retrieve rows that match your criteria:

SELECT * FROM your_table WHERE FIND_IN_SET('value', field_with_comma_sep_values) > 0;

Basically, FIND_IN_SET returns the index of the found item. So this query finds all rows where it finds the matching word in the "set" of comma separated values.

Credit: I knew there was something like this, but this post is where I found the answer and the SELECT statement.