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up vote 0 down vote favorite

I have a tag system where the tags are stored inside a row as an imploded array like so: "value1, value2, value3, etc..."
And I'm trying to make a tag search page but I have no idea how to convert it to an array to see if the certain tag someone searched in is in the array(because I can't explode it whilst using SELECT).

Can anyone help or is it impossible?

Thank you all for your help, it worked.

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Don't forget to accept whatever answer has helped. –  WojtekT May 26 '12 at 21:16

5 Answers 5

up vote 2 down vote

There's a mysql function called FIND_IN_SET which operates on comma separated strings. For example:

SELECT * FROM posts WHERE FIND_IN_SET('some_tag', post_tags)>0

Documentation here: Mysql FIND_IN_SET

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up vote 1 down vote

I think the better way is to normalize data and move tags to a separate table and then join tags to your entity. Search would be fast and easy =)

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up vote 0 down vote

Read $tags_str from your data base.

Convert string to array: 

   <?php
    $tags_str = "value1, value2, value3";
    $tags_arr = explode(', ', $tags_str);
    ?>

Then use in_array() PHP function for searching mathes.

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up vote 0 down vote

You can just use "LIKE" in your select query

SELECT row FROM table WHERE tag LIKE '%search_value%'
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This would fail if you had for example tags: 'cat food','cat food suplies'. –  WojtekT May 26 '12 at 20:58
up vote 0 down vote

Normalize your database with

tags {
  object_id
  tag_id
}

Or, if you're lazy, just do 

UPDATE tags = CONCAT(",", tags, ",") FROM table

And then

SELECT * FROM table WHERE tags LIKE '%,selected_tag,%'
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