From: Dan Nelson
Date: March 24 2005 7:59pm
Subject: Re: a very tricky string extraction
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/181687
Message-Id: <20050324195957.GD10908@dan.emsphone.com>
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In the last episode (Mar 24), Ed Reed said:
> This is an interesting problem that I hope someone can help me with. I
> have a varchar field that contains data like this,
>  
> 01/01/05 SG Reviewed this
> 12/15/03 DSD Reviewed that 
> 10/24/02 EWW Worked on that and tested this then stop to do something else
> 05/02/01 AW Did something
> 08/31/98 DSD Tested this
> 07/22/97 EWW Worked on that and did something 
>  
> I need a Select statement that returns the Date for the first
> occurance of the 'Tested this' substring
>  
> So far what I've come up with doesn't quite get what I need and it's
> already pretty hairy. I wonder if there's a more elegant way that I'm
> unaware of.

How about:

SELECT LEFT(description, 8) FROM mytable WHERE description LIKE "%tested this%" LIMIT 1

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@stripped