explode in a query

[seby]

i have an array of numbers in mysql in this format:

1,2,3,4,5

those are id's of a category in another table, I do a left join to get the cat name for those id's .. but the left join only returns the first name for the first id because of the comma.

how can i do some sort of explode to get all the cat names in that array of numbers in a query? possible? or will i have to fetch those id's which are in an array, explode them and then make another query which gets all the cat names?

just trying to avoid running a query loop inside another query which results in an endless loop of queries.

[AstroTeg]

Sounds like a database design problem. Those numbers you have in an array should be in another table. Then with one query, you could fetch all your categories.

MySQL has some string handling functions, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have explode available to it.

You could do what you were thinking which is pull the array out and then process it with PHP and then requery.

You might be able to just use the array in the WHERE clause as "WHERE categoryID IN (1,2,3,4,5)". But I don't have enough info to know if this would help or not...