Taking apart "0110100101101" and storing each character in separate field.

medar

This is sort of related to an earlier question...I am debating the structure of the database and how best to display this data.

I have a string:

00011000011010000010000000000001001101100005

The zeros and ones above each correspond to a text comment...ie if the first is a zero, my text is NULL, but if it is a 1, my text is "Blue".

Each of the 43 digits above are NULL if NO (0)...and a different text comment if YES (1). The "5" at the end signifies the END of the string.

I have stored this string, and with some help from the kind folks here I can display the appropriate text per variable (all 43 of em). But thinking on it further, I also need to be able to create a table where I can SORT on each variable as well.

So I am thinking I can have a field for each character...and treat it as a TRUE or FALSE field (ie data_1 = 0 (False), data_2=1 (true)...etc).

That would allow me to simply query the information, drop it into a table, and easily sort based off the "hard" data in the table (instead of trying to switch/case each record each time I sort.

The question is this - what command do I use to break out EACH number and assign it a variable for input into a database?

Using the above example of: 00011000011010000010000000000001001101100005

$data_1 = 0
$data_2 = 0
$data_3 = 0
$data_4 = 1
$data_5 = 1

etc...

How do I break this thing apart!

barand

You can treat the whole string as an array, so if you want the status of the nth char, use

$str{$n}

Armed with this it's easy to transfer each char into an array element

$array = array();

for ($n=0; $str{$n} != 5; $n++) { $array[] = $str{$n}; }

$array can be sorted with asort($array) and you can loop through it to write to a db table

hth

nemonoman

I think what you're saying is that you want to sort, for example, on character 6 of your 43 character string?

If the whole string is saved in a SQL record, you can sort all your records on the sixth charcter using substring in your order by clause:

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE 1=1
ORDER BY SUBSTRING(myStringColumn, 6, 1)

This will be faster than an array walk.