Hi

I have a column named Tags of varchar type which hold tags separated by commas.

Example of a possible field value for Tags: bikes, road trip, summer

will obviously select the example row but it shouldn't since it doesn't come under road but under road trip.

Using PHP's preg_match is easy but in this case I need a SQL solution.

How do I go abt making the condition for the query using the Regexp (^|,\s*)road(\s*,|$) ?

Now I got this to work and it doesnt select the road trip row for road, but neither does it get selected for road trip
Any idea what I might be dong wrong here ?

Thanx

make sure there are no extraneous spaces around your commas, and then do this:

... WHERE CONCAT(',',Tags,',') LIKE '%,road,%'

Nice workaround, but having to change the current set of data to get trim whitespaces surrounding the commas is not viable.

Anyway, MySQL doesnt seem to recognize \s - I just replaced it with a whitespace and it worked !

well, if every comma is consistently followed by a space, then you can simply do it like this --see the difference?

Problem is, the tag information was entered by users via an html form (were told to separate tags by a comma) which is still online and I just can't rely on the data entered by them. Obviously, the back-end script would be modified to strip spaces surrounding commas, but for the existing data, I'll need to assume any number of spaces surrounding a comma.