按MySQL字段中的单词数排序

Question

I would like to sort a result from a MySQL query by the number of words in a specified column.

Something like this:

SELECT bar FROM foo ORDER BY WordCountFunction(bar)

Is it possible?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no word count function in MySQL, but you can count the number of spaces and add one if your data is formatted properly (space separator for words, no spaces at beginning/end of entry).

Here is the query listing longest words first:

SELECT bar FROM foo ORDER BY (LENGTH(bar) - LENGTH(REPLACE(bar, ' ', ''))+1) DESC

Answer 2

使用此方法计算列中的单词数，您的查询将如下所示：

SELECT bar FROM foo ORDER BY (LENGTH(bar) - LENGTH(REPLACE(bar, ' ', ''))+1) DESC

Answer 3

Yes, sort of. It won't be 100% accurate though:

SELECT SUM(LENGTH(bar) - LENGTH(REPLACE(bar, ' ', ''))+1) as count
FROM table
ORDER BY count DESC

But this assumes the words are separated by a space ' ' and doesn't account for punctuation. You can always replace it with another char and it doesn't account for double spaces or other chars either.

For complete accuracy, you could always pull the result out and word-count in your language of choice - where accurate word-count function do exist!

Hope this helps.