从 SQL 中的字符串中提取前一个单词

Question

I have an SQL table with employee biographies.

One of the columns is named Biography.

Some entries describe how many years the employee has worked at the company.

An example:

"Gary has worked for us for 8 years"

I want to extract the number of years each employee has worked for the company.

I need an sql query that will identify for each entry the word "years", extract the previous word as an INT, and store this number in the same row as a new column.

Can somebody help explain how to do this for me?

Thanks.

Answer 1

MySQL SUBSTRING_INDEX() returns the substring from the given string before a specified number of occurrences of a delimiter.

Syntax:

SUBSTRING_INDEX(string, delimeter, count)

• string: column_name or a constant string
• delimeter: string before which we are finding the prefix
• count: The number of times to search for the delimiter

Taking tablename as test and column name which we need to update as new_column and column containing string as query_string

UPDATE test SET new_column=(SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(TRIM(SUBSTRING_INDEX(query_string, 'years', 1)), ' ', -1 ) )

Hope this helps!!

Answer 2

In MySQL, you can use substring_index() :

select substring_index(trim(substring_index(col, 'years', 1)), ' ', -1) 

Here is a db<>fiddle.