I'm sure you are aware that this is a non-normalized database design, and that those tend to make designing queries more difficult and/or inefficient.
The LIKE operator should give you what you want, but you need to be careful: (PHP string def:) $sSQL = "SELECT <list> FROM <table> WHERE readBy LIKE '$UserID,%' OR readBy LIKE '%,$UserID' OR readBy LIKE '%,$UserID,%'" You need to look for the three situations to avoid matching the wrong entries in for example (11,20) (5,11) or (5,11,20). HTH, Tore ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rich Hutchins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 8:42 PM Subject: Perplexed by reverse SELECT statement. > Man, this was a tough MySQL question to assign a Subject to. Hopefully the > answer > is easier. > > I have a table called news which contains a column called readBy. The read > by column is of type TEXT and it contains a CSV list of IDs of users who > have read a certain news item. For example, if my user ID is 1 and I have > read news item 50, the readBy column might look like this: 2,10,9,73,1 > > When I do a SELECT of all news items from this news table, I want to select > only those items that I have not read - ones where the user ID 1 is NOT in > the readBY column. > > I have attempted to pull this off using find_in_set and where not like, but > have not been able to get the results I expect. Any advice? > > Thanks in advance. > Rich > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Before posting, please check: > http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) > http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) > > To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
