MySQL noob... Please help...

[ChaosKnight]

I'm a complete noob when it comes to databases,

in the project that I'm busy with there is a column

which is filled with a lot of game parks and they are

separated with commas, how can I tell the query

to return each entry? 

 

At the moment I do this like so:

SELECT * FROM $table WHERE `country` = '".$country."' AND `active` = 'yes'

 

Please assist

 

Thanks!

[trq]

Do you mean each entry between the comas? That would need to be done with php, data shouldn't be stored coma separated within  database for this (and a few other) reason(s).

[cags]

That is a poor table design, you should not have multiple values stored in a single field as this makes it very difficult to do anything with a specific entry from that field. The standard way around this would be to have extra tables. It's not entirely clear from your post what the exact relationship is which makes it difficult to give you an exact design. For this reason I'll make up an example. Let's say you have a table (we'll call it `places`) that stores information on game parks and an example row in your table has a field called `parks` which contains "park1,park2,park3". What you would do is create an extra table called something like `place_parks` which would contain a field for `place_id` and a field for `park` and probably a unique id `park_id`. This way we can select all parks in a place using "SELECT * FROM place_parks WHERE place_id=1" or we can select individual parks using "SELECT * FROM place_parks WHERE park_id=2".

[ChaosKnight]

I think I'll do it like you suggested, thanks cags, the previous web developer did it like I mentioned, he threw everything into the same table and that is where the mess started, but thanks