MySQL 5.1 - XPath Question

[Pesho]

Hi all,

 

For my project I have to use the new MySQL 5 built-in XPath Support.

 

However, I've come across the following problem:

Sometimes XML documents have several tags of the same type. For example:

 

<book>

<author>a1</author>

<author>a2</author>

<author>a3</author>

<book>

 

to query for the authors I use: select ExtractValue(column_name, 'book/author') from table_name;

 

it returns all the authors, separated with white space as follows: a1 a2 a3

 

This is pretty inconvenient for parsing if a single author has two names.

 

So, do you know any way to make MySQL return the result with any other separator string, except for white space.

 

Or maybe any other approach to extract the different authors using PHP???

 

 

I'd be very grateful if you can help!!!

 

 

Regards,

Pesho