Strip comma separated value - php

Question

I am using PHP and MySQL database
I Have a table which has a column: actors
In a row in the table, in the actors column, there maybe several actors listed e.g. Denzel Washington, Charlie Sheen, Matt Damon
The next row might be: Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington
They are always comma seperated.
I have an autocomplete where I am asking the user to choose an actor. So, when the autocomplete looks in the column, it returns the whole column value.
e.g. someone searching for Denzel will get in their autocomplete results:
Denzel Washington, Charlie Sheen, Matt Damon
Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington
As far as I know there's no way to seperate this at that level so I'm thinking I might have to strip out the actors from that table, into a seperate table which just services the autocomplete.
Is this the best way to do it and if so, can it be done? Is there a simple SQL query i could use to get the actors out, seperately, then load another table. This is constantly updated data so needs to run every day but I presume if I had the actor column in a new table as unique then i wouldn't have duplicates.
Or is there a more efficient way?
NOTE: I need to point out that this is a XML feed and I have no control over the data - yes, I know it should all be seperate from the get go but unfortunately I'm just working with what I have

Answer 1

What you need is something like this
table actors
id | name
table actor_entries
id | data_id | actor_id
table data
id | <other columns>
Then your data would like something like this
table actors
1 | Denzel Washington
2 | Charlie Sheen
3 | Robert De Niro
table data
1 | some data // this row is associated with actors 1 and 2
2 | some data // this row is associated with actors 2 and 3
table actor_entries ( id | data_id | actor_id )
1 | 1 | 1
2 | 1 | 2
3 | 2 | 2
4 | 2 | 3

Answer 2

What you should have had is three different tables:
Movies Actors MovieActors
---- ---- ----------
movie_id PK actor_id PK movie_id FK
title name actor_id FK
year born
gender
Then you would not have that huge mess. Also you would be able to search data
SELECT Actors.name FROM Actors WHERE Actors.name LIKE '%Pam' LIMIT 5
Or get all movies where actor has participated:
SELECT
Movies.title
FROM Movies
LEFT JOIN MovieActors USING(movie_id)
LEFT JOIN Actors USING(actor_id)
WHERE
Actors.name = 'Foo Bar'
AND Movies.year > 1990
If you already know the basics of SQL, i would suggest for you to read SQL Antipatterns. That book covers this an many other issues.

Answer 3

This is probably not a very good way to store data since it would become very slow and difficult to maintain once the csv reaches a certain size.
Anyway, as for your question, let me know if this helps:
<?php
$search = $_GET['search']; // assume it's 'de'
$result = array(); // this contains the result
$sql = 'SELECT `actors` from `tablename`;';
$run = mysql_query( $sql );
if ( $run && mysql_num_rows( $run ) ) {
while ( ( $data = mysql_fetch_assoc( $run ) ) !== FALSE) {
$num = explode( ',', $data[ 'actors' ] );
for ($i=0; $i < $num; $i++) {
if( stripos( $data[ $i ], $search ) !== false ) {
$result[] = trim( $data[ $i ] );
}
}
}
}
// here's the result you want
$result = array_values( array_unique( $result ) );
?>
This will work, but again, as many have suggested, this is not a very good choice.

Answer 4

You can use the php explode function with ',' as separator. It will return an array with all
actor name