MySQL substring extraction using delimiter

Question

I want to extract the substrings from a string in MySQL. The string contains multiple substrings separated by commas(','). I need to extract these substrings using any MySQL functions.

For example:

Table Name: Product ----------------------------------- item_code  name    colors ----------------------------------- 102        ball     red,yellow,green 104        balloon  yellow,orange,red   

I want to select the colors field and extract the substrings as red, yellow and green as separated by comma.

Answer 1

A possible duplicate of this: Split value from one field to two

Unfortunately, MySQL does not feature a split string function. As in the link above indicates there are User-defined Split function.

A more verbose version to fetch the data can be the following:

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX(colors, ',', 1), ',', -1) as colorfirst,        SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX(colors, ',', 2), ',', -1) as colorsecond ....        SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX(colors, ',', n), ',', -1) as colornth   FROM product;