[nycphp-talk] MySQL is very smart - but why does this work?
Jayesh Sheth
jayeshsh at ceruleansky.com
Mon Dec 22 15:45:33 EST 2003
Hello all,
I discovered the following accidentally, and it does what I want. The
thing is, I would not expect MySQL to behave in this way.
I have a table called "archives". The archives table has a column called
"genre_match", which contains either a single number, or a comma
separated list of numbers.
If run the following query:
SELECT * FROM archives WHERE genre_match = 2
it selects the rows whose genre_match column has the following info
- 2
- 2, 34, 96
- 14, 2, 25
but it does not select the rows whose genre_match column contains the
following info
- 12
- 22
- 32, 45, 19
If I put quotes around the 2, it does not work. I.E:
SELECT * FROM archives WHERE genre_match = '2'
I am unbelievably pleased with the result, but I am wondering why MySQL
behaves in such a (clever) way.
I was trying to do this with LIKE, but that was not working. (And ideas
on dong the same thing with LIKE would be greatly appreciated).
Thanks in advance,
- Jay
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