Split value from one field to two

Question

I\'ve got a table field membername which contains both the last name and the first name of users. Is it possible to split those into 2 fields memberfirst<

Answer 1

SELECT variant (not creating a user defined function):

SELECT IF(
        LOCATE(' ', `membername`) > 0,
        SUBSTRING(`membername`, 1, LOCATE(' ', `membername`) - 1),
        `membername`
    ) AS memberfirst,
    IF(
        LOCATE(' ', `membername`) > 0,
        SUBSTRING(`membername`, LOCATE(' ', `membername`) + 1),
        NULL
    ) AS memberlast
FROM `user`;

This approach also takes care of:

• membername values without a space: it will add the whole string to memberfirst and sets memberlast to NULL.
• membername values that have multiple spaces: it will add everything before the first space to memberfirst and the remainder (including additional spaces) to memberlast.

The UPDATE version would be:

UPDATE `user` SET
    `memberfirst` = IF(
        LOCATE(' ', `membername`) > 0,
        SUBSTRING(`membername`, 1, LOCATE(' ', `membername`) - 1),
        `membername`
    ),
    `memberlast` = IF(
        LOCATE(' ', `membername`) > 0,
        SUBSTRING(`membername`, LOCATE(' ', `membername`) + 1),
        NULL
    );