Trying to match

zzz

I have a table containing user records. One of the table cells contains zipcodes like 77000,77001,77002,77003,77004,77005

I need to create a query to match this user to another record which also has similar cell conataining zipcodes 77005,77006,77007,77008,77009.

If atleast one zipcode matches at least one from table 2, I need to get that record.

How can I do that?

I was thinking of something like

WHERE t1.zip LIKE t2.zip

But this does not look like it would work, especially if each cell contains say 50 zipcodes, would it?

bpat1434

You really need to rethink the database structure for something like this. A better approach would be to take the zipcodes and put them into a different table and map the zipcode to user_ids. So that zipcodes table will be nothing but three columns: id (just to keep things organized), user_id, zipcode. So the user_id can be repeated as many times as it wants, and the zipcode can be repeated for as many users, but you can now search the zipcodes like you want.

Now, depending upon the accuracy you want to go with, you will have to modify your LIKE statement to use only the first 3 or 4 numbers of a zipcode, and replace the last 1 or 2 with one and only one "%" sign. For example:

$zip = substr($zipcode, 0, 3) . '%';

$query = "SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE zipcode LIKE '$zip'";

Hope that helps.