Counting word occurrences in a table column

Question

I have a table with a varchar(255) field. I want to get (via a query, function, or SP) the number of occurences of each word in a group of rows from this table.

If there are 2 rows with these fields:

"I like to eat bananas"
"I don't like to eat like a monkey"

I want to get

    word | count()
    ---------------
    like  3
    eat   2
    to    2
    i     2
    a     1

Any idea? I am using MySQL 5.2.

Answer 1

@Elad Meidar, I like your question and I found a solution:

SELECT SUM(total_count) as total, value
FROM (

SELECT count(*) AS total_count, REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(x.value,'?',''),'.',''),'!','') as value
FROM (
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX(t.sentence, ' ', n.n), ' ', -1) value
  FROM table_name t CROSS JOIN 
(
   SELECT a.N + b.N * 10 + 1 n
     FROM 
    (SELECT 0 AS N UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) a
   ,(SELECT 0 AS N UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9) b
    ORDER BY n
) n
 WHERE n.n <= 1 + (LENGTH(t.sentence) - LENGTH(REPLACE(t.sentence, ' ', '')))
 ORDER BY value

) AS x
GROUP BY x.value

) AS y
GROUP BY value

Here is the full working fiddle: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/17481a/1

First we do a query to extract all words as explained here by @peterm(follow his instructions if you want to customize the total number of words processed). Then we convert that into a sub-query and then we COUNT and GROUP BY the value of each word, and then make another query on top of that to GROUP BY not grouped words cases where accompanied signs might be present. ie: hello = hello! with a REPLACE