Extracting Entries From Arrays From My Database

jkrystof

I query a field within my database and when I echo the value from the table entry I get the following:

a:2:{i:0;s:8:"Joe";i:1;s:15:"Jenny";}
a:1:{i:0;s:11:"Jimmy";}
a:1:{i:0;s:8:"Joe";}

Can anyone point me in the right direction to find out what rows a Joe exists in? Sorry I'm a bit of a newb but learning quick. In this example for instance it would be in row 0 and row 2 but just trying to figure out how to output an array that tells me that.

bradgrafelman

Looks like the DB was designed such that you aren't supposed to use the contents of that column in a query (otherwise it wouldn't be a string of serialized data). One way might be to perform a LIKE query to see if the string "Joe" appears anywhere in the column.

Weedpacket

bradgrafelman wrote:
Looks like the DB was designed such that you aren't supposed to use the contents of that column in a query (otherwise it wouldn't be a string of serialized data)

Or maybe it was an attempt at porting the database from a DBMS that supported array types, and it wasn't renormalised.

Searching for serialize("Joe") (i.e., [font=monospace]s:3:"Joe";[/font] (obviously the example data has been anonymised, or it wouldn't say [font=monospace]s:8[/font])) might reduce the (very slight) chance of false positives and may affect the speed of searching one way or another. But whether the search is for [font=monospace]s:3:"Joe";[/font] or [font=monospace]"Joe"[/font], the returned array would still need to be deserialised and the string searched for again.