How can I count existing and non-existing values with MySQL?
        Posted  
        
            by 
                jaya malladi
            
        on Stack Overflow
        
        See other posts from Stack Overflow
        
            or by jaya malladi
        
        
        
        Published on 2012-11-15T06:11:00Z
        Indexed on 
            2012/11/15
            11:01 UTC
        
        
        Read the original article
        Hit count: 242
        
I am new to MySQL.
I have a table with answer ids.
Answers can look like this:a1, a2, a3 ..., but due to some problems some are NULL, some are blank, and some are others like 1 a etc.
Now I want to calculate the count of ids with a1 a2 a3 distinctly. But how is it possible to do this leaving others like NULL, blanks and garbage. 
The output should look like this
atype count 
a1      45
a2       0
a3      56
If there is no row entry for a particular answer, the count should be 0.
© Stack Overflow or respective owner