Joining individual pieces of text data into a singular string is nothing new in the programming world and all languages support some form of concatenation. In MySQL, you can use the CONCAT() function. Let’s see how…
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MySQL CONCAT() syntax
I’m using the ‘actor’ table from the well-known Sakila database for the example queries.
The MySQL CONCAT() function syntax is simple and easy to remember:
CONCAT(string_1,string_2, ... );
There should be at least 1 parameter passed into any CONCAT() function call or you will receive an error:
SELECT CONCAT() AS full_name FROM actor LIMIT 5; Error Code: 1582. Incorrect parameter count in the call to native function 'CONCAT'
MySQL CONCAT() usage
As a novel attempt, we could try placing a space between the ‘first_name’ and ‘last_name’ columns from the ‘actor’ table, but, that doesn’t join the values into a single string:
SELECT first_name, ' ', last_name
FROM actor
LIMIT 5;
However, if you pass in both the ‘first_name’ and ‘last_name’ columns as parameters to CONCAT(), they are joined into a string:
SELECT CONCAT(first_name, last_name) AS full_name
FROM actor
LIMIT 5;
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Notice there is no space between the ‘first_name’ and ‘last_name’ values in the previous example.
Yet, CONCAT() accepts multiple parameters, so you can simply pass in a space character as one of them:
SELECT CONCAT(first_name,' ', last_name) AS full_name
FROM actor
LIMIT 5;
In the below query, I’m passing 4 parameters to CONCAT(), 1 of which is prepended to the beginning of the string :
SELECT CONCAT('And the winner is: ', first_name,' ', last_name) AS full_name
FROM actor
LIMIT 5;
Try using CONCAT() in any of your queries where you need string concatenation.
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Similar reading
You may enjoy any of the below posts in addition to this one:
- MySQL SHOW Tables – 2 variations
- MySQL Beginners Series — The SELECT statement
- SUBSTRING_INDEX() function in MySQL – with examples.
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Disclaimer: The majority of examples in this post, are performed in a personal development/learning workstation environment and should not be considered production quality or ready. Your particular goals and needs may vary. Like always, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. My opinions are my own.
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Code, content, and community for developers.
The LAMP stack and the PHP technologies and frameworks it runs.
Disclosure: Some of this blog post’s services and product links are affiliate links. At no additional cost to you, should you make a purchase by clicking through one of them, I will receive a commission.
Code, content, and community for developers.
The LAMP stack and the PHP technologies and frameworks it runs.