Hi All,

Not sure how to do this (or even if you can) but thought I would ask
anyway.

I have a database of names and would like to do a selection based on the
number or words in a name

eg the name "Peter Smith" has 2 words
the name "Peter John Smith" has 3 words
the name "Peter John Fred Smith" has 4 words

(sorry if this is too obvious but I am just trying to make myself clear)

So the selections I would like to do are based on the number of words in
the name.

IE I would like to select all names where there are 3 words in it for
instance. If there were such a function as words(string) which returned the
number of words in a string then the simple select syntax would be:

select * from names where words(name) = 3

Of course in MySql there is no such function (that I am aware of)  - so any
ideas how I can achieve this result.

Thanking You
Clyde Engalnd

PS: one obvious solution is to add another field to the table eg NumWords
then write code to maintain this field with the correct nubmer of words in
a name. I was trying to avoid this and hoping to be able to just use native
MySql functions.



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