I don't think there's a way to do it with SQL in MySQL. Jay's talking about a substring search within a field and what you really want is to know if two whole rows (multiple columns) within a database are similar or not. You could pull in all the data and use PHP to figure out what's similar (bulky, brute force and potentially system resource hoggish) You could try using a little logic to whittle it down to a few columns that you suspect may be similar. Like if you're looking for duplicate contacts, you might check for duplicate phone numbers: select Phone, count(*) from contacts group by Phone having count(*) > 1 (something like that.. syntax may be off a little) Or may check addresses: select Address, SUBSTRING(Address, 1, 5), count(*) from contacts group by SUBSTRING(Address, 1, 5) having count(*) > 1 You could get really crazy and use SOUNDEX(CONCAT(col1, col2, col3, col4)) and see if you get any duplicate entries. No idea how well that'd work, but SOUNDEX is made for doing a basic comparison of two things to see if they're similar. Maybe not as good as some other similar string comparisons in PHP, but not all of them are available in MySQL. In PHP, see soundex(), metaphone(), similar_text() and levenshtein() for more information about similar string testing. -TG = = = Original message = = = [snip] I need a script that selects all similar rows from a database. Like only the id would differ, but other fields would be the same as other rows's fields. I don't know if there is such a mysql statement like SELECT SIMILAR ... Please assist me with using the right mysql statement or using php to get similar rows from the db. [/snip] See http://www.mysql.com/like ___________________________________________________________ Sent by ePrompter, the premier email notification software. Free download at http://www.ePrompter.com. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
