Hi,

I have a table say, ITEM, in MySQL that stores data as follows:

ID    FEATURES
--------------------
1     AB,CD,EF,XY
2     PQ,AC,A3,B3
3     AB,CDE
4     AB1,BC3
--------------------

As an input, I will get a CSV string, something like "AB,PQ". I want to get the records that contain AB or PQ. I realized that we've to write a MySQL function to achieve this. So, if we have this magical function MATCH_ANY defined in MySQL that does this, I would then simply execute an SQL as follows:

select * from ITEM where MATCH_ANY(FEAURES, "AB,PQ") = 0

The above query would return the records 1, 2 and 3.

But I'm running into all sorts of problems while implementing this function as I realized that MySQL doesn't support arrays and there's no simple way to split strings based on a delimiter.

Remodeling the table is the last option for me as it involves lot of issues.

I might also want to execute queries containing multiple MATCH_ANY functions such as:

select * from ITEM where MATCH_ANY(FEATURES, "AB,PQ") = 0 and MATCH_ANY(FEATURES, "CDE")

In the above case, we would get an intersection of records (1, 2, 3) and (3) which would be just 3.

Any help is deeply appreciated.

Thanks