CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sql
ehul
ehul

Reputation: 19

SQL -- SELECT statement -- concatenate strings to

I have an SQL question. Everything works fine in the below SELECT statement except the portion I have highlighted in bold. What I'm trying to do is allow the user to search for a specific Rule within the database. Unfortunately, I do not actually have a Rule column, and so I need to concatenate certain field values to create a string with which to compare to the user's searchtext.

Any idea why the part in bold does not work? In theory, I would like this statement to check for whether the string "Rule " + part_num (where part_num is the value contained in the part_num field) equals the value of searchtext (the value of searchtext is obtained from my PHP script).

I did some research on concatenating strings for SQL purposes, but none seem to fit the bill. Does someone out there have any suggestions?

SELECT id, 
       part_num, 
       part_title, 
       rule_num, 
       rule_title, 
       sub_heading_num, 
       sub_heading, 
       contents 
FROM   rules 
WHERE  part_title LIKE "%'.$searchtext.'%" 
        OR rule_title LIKE "%'.$searchtext.'%" 
        OR sub_heading LIKE "%'.$searchtext.'%" 
        OR contents LIKE "%'.$searchtext.'%" 
        OR "rule" + part_num LIKE "%'.$searchtext.'%"  --RULE PLUS PART_NUM DOESN'T WORK
ORDER  BY id;

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2691

Answers (2)

James Hill
James Hill

Reputation: 61792

Since you didn't specify which DB your using, I'm going to assume SQL Sever.

Strings are specified in SQL Server with single quotes 'I'm a string', not double quotes.

See + (String Concatenation) on MSDN for examples.

Upvotes: 3

Tim
Tim

Reputation: 8921

Another possibility is that part_num is a numeric. If so, cast the number to a string (varchar) before concatenating.

Upvotes: 0

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