How to prepend a string to a column value in MySQL?

mysql sql-update
santanu picture santanu · Mar 25, 2009 · Viewed 152k times · Source

I need a SQL update statement for updating a particular field of all the rows with a string "test" to be added in the front of the existing value.

For example, if the existing value is "try" it should become "testtry".

Answer

Paul Dixon picture Paul Dixon · Mar 25, 2009

You can use the CONCAT function to do that:

UPDATE tbl SET col=CONCAT('test',col);

If you want to get cleverer and only update columns which don't already have test prepended, try

UPDATE tbl SET col=CONCAT('test',col)
WHERE col NOT LIKE 'test%';

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