MySQL: Use CONCAT to include text in SELECT results

Tagged: MySQL

The CONCAT function in MySQL allows SELECT statements to act like printf commands by mingling text and query results together.

For example, to generate a quick list of links in HTML from a table ‘links’ with the columns ‘url’ (http://www.tech-recipes.com) and ‘title’ (Tech-Recipes) so that the output looks like:

Tech-Recipes


use a select statement like:

SELECT CONCAT('<a href="', url, '">', title, '</a><br />') FROM links;

The CONCAT function simply joins the comma-separated list of strings and expressions (in this case column results from the query: url and title). As with any SELECT statement, the result set can be varied with the use of an optional WHERE clause and other valid SQL syntax.