Using MySQL
, I can do something like:
SELECT hobbies FROM peoples_hobbies WHERE person_id = 5;
My Output:
shopping
fishing
coding
but instead I just want 1 row, 1 col:
Expected Output:
shopping, fishing, coding
The reason is that I'm selecting multiple values from multiple tables, and after all the joins I've got a lot more rows than I'd like.
I've looked for a function on MySQL Doc and it doesn't look like the CONCAT
or CONCAT_WS
functions accept result sets.
So does anyone here know how to do this?
You can use GROUP_CONCAT
:
SELECT person_id,
GROUP_CONCAT(hobbies SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id;
As Ludwig stated in his comment, you can add the DISTINCT
operator to avoid duplicates:
SELECT person_id,
GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT hobbies SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id;
As Jan stated in their comment, you can also sort the values before imploding it using ORDER BY
:
SELECT person_id,
GROUP_CONCAT(hobbies ORDER BY hobbies ASC SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id;
As Dag stated in his comment, there is a 1024 byte limit on the result. To solve this, run this query before your query:
SET group_concat_max_len = 2048;
Of course, you can change 2048
according to your needs. To calculate and assign the value:
SET group_concat_max_len = CAST(
(SELECT SUM(LENGTH(hobbies)) + COUNT(*) * LENGTH(', ')
FROM peoples_hobbies
GROUP BY person_id) AS UNSIGNED);