MySQL: Find if a value is in a list of values

Databases
1

Hi all,

I have a text field that contains a list of IDs e.g. 16,20,24,29,38,40

I need to find any records where that field contains a particular ID.

I thought that something like SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE IDlistfield CONTAINS myID but that doesn’t work.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

TIA

Tom

2

What you should do is get rid of multiple values separated by commas in a column.

But something like this should work:

SELECT * 
FROM tablename 
WHERE IDlistfield LIKE '16%'
OR IDlistfield LIKE '%,16,%'
OR IDlistfield LIKR '%,16'
3

It would be better to change your data model to avoid putting comma separated values into a field. Searching will be easier. The code above is almost correct but if you have a number 16x then this will be accepted. Try this:


SELECT * 
FROM tablename 
WHERE IDlistfield = '16'
OR IDlistfield LIKE '16,%'
OR IDlistfield LIKE '%,16,%'
OR IDlistfield LIKR '%,16'
4

Ah yes, I forgot the , after the 16. And I forgot the 16 as a single value too. Good catch!

5

WHERE FIND_IN_SET(‘16’,IDlistfield) > 0

but all of these solutions are slow, and will not scale – the more rows in the table, the slower the query gets

you should normalize that data

6

Thanks to everyone for your replies. I wish I could rearrange the data but I’m stuck with it.

I’ll check out your book Rudy.

Cheers