How to count the total number of values from various rows, when each row has multiple data seperated by comma?

Question

I have a database table with only 1 column. Each row/cell in the table contains a number of values separated by commas. Some cells contain NULL (no value). I want to get the number total number of values in all the rows. (Using php & mysql)

---

| Table |

| 32,33 |

| 21 |

| NULL |

|45,61,52|

Hence the total number of data should be 6, ie 2 in 1st row, 1 in 2nd row & 3 in 4th row.

Answer 1

The value count will be +1 than comma count. But if a column doesn't have comma, it should be zero. So this will work:

SELECT sum(LENGTH('col1') - LENGTH(REPLACE('col1', ',', ''))+1) AS total 
FROM table1 WHERE LENGTH('col1')>0 

Answer 2

Using php extract all the values in an array and use explode to get the total number of values.

$i=0;
while(mysqli_num_rows($result) >0)
{
  while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($conn, $result))
  {
    $data_elements = explode(',',$row['data']); // extract all the comma seperated value in array
    $i += count($data_elements); //count them all
  }
}
echo $i; // these are your total number of values

hope it helped :)

Answer 3

This assumes comma indicates one value

    SELECT sum(LENGTH('field1') - LENGTH(REPLACE('field1', ',', ''))+1) 
AS comma_sum from table1

Test this and let me know how it goes