MySQL: Query for two values' presence - php

Question

I have a table with fields id, text, and title. There may be multiple rows with the same title (title is not unique). Additionally, id is the primary key.
I need only to know if there are at least one row with title="A" that contains the string "aaa" in text, and additionally at least one row with title="B" that contains the string "bbb" in text.
This is what I tried:
mysql> SELECT (SELECT text FROM table WHERE title = 'A') as aText, (SELECT text FROM table WHERE title = 'B') as bText;
I had planned on parsing the values of aText and bText for the strings "aaa" and "bbb" respectfully with PHP. However, I have two issues:
1) Major issue: Due to title not being unique, the subqueries may return multiple rows. MySQL breaks on that happening with this error:
ERROR 1242 (21000): Subquery returns more than 1 row
2) Minor issue: The reason that I am parsing in PHP is to avoid using MySQL's LIKE operator. Would I be better off doing the parsing of the string right there in MySQL as such:
mysql> SELECT (SELECT text FROM table WHERE title = 'A' AND text LIKE '%aaa%') as aText, (SELECT text FROM table WHERE title = 'B' AND text LIKE '%bbb%') as bText;

Answer 1

SELECT (SELECT count(*) FROM table WHERE title='A') AS A_count,
(SELECT count(*) FROM table WHERE title='B') AS B_count
WHERE (A_count > 0) AND (B_count > 0)
this would return 1 row (with the counts) and no rows if either'A' or 'B' is not present.
A subquery returning data to a field in a parent query can only ever return a single value. You're basically replacing a fieldname with a query result, which means the query result has to behave the same as a normal table field would. Hence the "returns more than 1 row" error - you're returning all of the rows where 'A' or 'B' matches, which is not a single field - it's a column.

Answer 2

If you just wanted to know if those rows existed, you could do something like this:
SELECT COUNT(1)
FROM table
WHERE (title = 'A' AND text = '%aaa%')
OR (title = 'B' AND text = '%bbb%')
-- EDIT --
Based on your comment, you may want to try the following query instead:
SELECT COUNT(1), title
FROM table
WHERE (title = 'A' AND text = '%aaa%')
OR (title = 'B' AND text = '%bbb%')
GROUP BY title
Check for two rows, both with a COUNT(1) of greater than zero.

Answer 3

You can self-join:
SELECT t1.text as `atext`, t2.text as `btext`
table as t1, table as t2
WHERE t1.title = 'A' AND t1.text LIKE '%aaa%' AND t2.title = 'B' AND t2.text LIKE '%bbb%';
If you want to do your parsing in php just leave off the where statement, but if what you're doing in php is equivalent to mysql's like statement I don't know why you wouldn't do it in the query.

Answer 4

It is probably not good form to answer one's own question, but for the sake of the fine archives at the expense of my karma:
The query that I employed is:
SELECT count(*) FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT title FROM (
SELECT title, text FROM table WHERE title IN ('A', 'B')
)
AS filtered
WHERE (title='A' AND text LIKE '%aaa%')
OR (title='B' AND text LIKE '%bbb%')
)
AS allResults;
The innermost query gets everything with a good title, the next query gets distinct titles for the real results. This setup ensures that the LIKE clause will not run on the entire table. I then wrap all that in a count, and if if equals 2 then I know that each condition was met.
Thank you everyone who contributed, I gained quite some insight from your answers!