MySQL How to Select only columns where value contains string

Question

I did some searching and from one question already posted on stackexchange, the answer was that it was not possible, but I figured to ask. I did not know if it was possible to form a SELECT query to dynamically select which columns will be displayed in a mysql SELECT statement result. Example:

Say I have column names Person, ID, Phone Number, Alt Number for this table:

John | 79 | 800-499-0000 | 800-499-5555

I would like to form a SELECT statement so that it will only pull down columns where string '800-499' is somewhere in the field. Thus the result from MySQL ideally would be:

800-499-0000 | 800-499-5555

The only problem is that I do not think dynamically selecting columns is possible.

Any help or confirmation is appreciated.

Answer 1

You could try something like:

select * from
(select concat(case when col1 like '%800-499-0000%' then concat('col1: ',col1,';') end,
               case when col2 like '%800-499-0000%' then concat('col2: ',col1,';') end,
 ...
               case when coln like '%800-499-0000%' then concat('coln: ',coln,';') end)
        as search_results
 from my_table) sq
where search_results is not null