Ross Hulford wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have an address stored as a serialized array
>
> address[0] = "my street";
> address[1] = "Edinburgh";
> address[2] = "Scotland";
>
> This is what I have. I want if it is possible to extract all the UNIQUE
> towns from my database.
>
> This is what the on of the entires looks like in my database.
>
> a:7:{s:8:"building";s:0:"";s:7:"company";s:0:"";s:5:"line1";s:12:"Leyland
>
> Road";s:5:"line2";s:0:"";s:5:"line3";s:0:"";s:4:"town";s:8:"Bathgate";s:6:"county";s:12:"West
>
> Lothian";}
You are missing the point of a database by denormalizing your data in
this way, and making it very hard to work with. You should read up on
first normal form and re-normalize your data. Not because I'm a MySQL
fan, but one of the most understandable explanations I've seen of this
is actually on the MySQL site:
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/intro-to-normalization.html
Yes it's possible with some SUBSTRING() and LOCATE() or
SUBSTRING_INDEX() calls, but it's not something I can stare at and tell
you how to do in 3 seconds, so I'll just refer you to the manual:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html
Baron
