What is the best practice for counting the total number of values in a column separated by commas in a MySQL table using PHP?

To count the total number of values in a column separated by commas in a MySQL table using PHP, you can fetch the column data, explode it by commas, and then count the resulting array. This can be achieved by executing a SQL query to select the column data, fetching the result set, exploding each row by commas, and incrementing a counter for each value found. Finally, display the total count of values in the column. 

// Connect to MySQL database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// SQL query to select column data
$sql = "SELECT column_name FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

// Initialize counter
$totalCount = 0;

// Fetch and count values separated by commas
if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        $values = explode(",", $row['column_name']);
        $totalCount += count($values);
    }
}

// Display total count of values
echo "Total count of values in the column: " . $totalCount;

// Close database connection
$conn->close();

Keywords

PHP MySQL explode COUNT column

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