Re: MySql Concat function equivalent

On 9 November 2010 13:46, Vaduvoiu Tiberiu <vaduvoiutibi(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:

> Is there any way to create a postgresql function that would take unlimited
> parameters like mysql's concat()? Currently my application was calling the
> concat function with parameters comming from php...something like "select
> concat(".implode(',',array)."). So without having a predefined number of
> parameters, I would need a function that could be able to concatenate the
> fields no matter how many they are. Is this possible?
>
>
Which version of PostgreSQL are you on? If you're on >= 8.4 you can use
these to simulate it:

CREATE FUNCTION concat(VARIADIC arr anyarray) RETURNS text AS $$
SELECT array_to_string($1, '');
$$ LANGUAGE SQL;

CREATE FUNCTION concat_ws(delim text, VARIADIC arr anyarray) RETURNS text AS
$$
SELECT array_to_string($2, $1);
$$ LANGUAGE SQL;

Then you can run:

SELECT concat(1,2,3);

to get:

123

or:

SELECT concat_ws('-',1,2,3);

to get:

1-2-3

Note that all elements of the array you're passing in have to be the same
type. And 9.1 should have this a better version of this functionality built
in: http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/functions-string.html

Hope that helps.

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Thom Brown
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