What would be the simplest way to locate the index of the third space in a string.
My goal is to get CCC
out of this space separated list: AAAA BBBB CCCC DDDD EEE
. where A and B and D are fixed length, and C is variable length, E F G are optional.
In Java I would use indexof, with a starting point of 10 and that would get me the third space, but it seems that I cannot do that in MySQL, so I thought maybe I could find a 'third index of' function?
You would want to use SUBSTRING_INDEX
function like this
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX(field, ' ', 3), ' ', -1)
FROM table
The inner function call would get you to AAAA BBBB CCCC
while the outer function call would pare that down to just CCCC
.