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How do i perform an If statement on a cloumn?

Discussion in 'SQL - Questions and Answers' started by Luke, May 24, 2006.

  1. Luke Guest

    Is is possibe to put an if statement on a column, for example, if a field in that column is empty then have it as false, if there is data in there then have it as true.
    Luke, May 24, 2006
    #1

  2. ben Administrator

    Dialect: MySQL
    Yes you can do that.
    Here is an example that will check wether a colum "is_valid", which stores an integer value of 1 (for YES) or 0 for (NO), is valid or not and return the string YES or NO accordingly.

    SQL:

    
SELECT 
    
id,
    
IF(is_valid = 1, 'YES', 'NO') as is_valid
    
FROM test_table


    In your case you just want to check if the a column (say "test_column") has a value or not so it will look something like:

    SQL:

    
SELECT,
    
id,
    
IF ( test_column  = '', 'FALSE', 'TRUE') as test_column
    
FROM test_table


    The column "test_column" must be NOT NULL. If it allows NULLs you could check for that:

    SQL:

    
IF(test_column IS NULL, 'FALSE', IF(test_column = '', 'FALSE', 'TRUE')) as test_column
    ben, May 25, 2006
    #2

  3. Dimitar Guest

    SQL:

    
SELECT (CASE
    
    WHEN column is null THEN 1
    
    WHEN trim(column) = '' THEN 2
    
    ELSE 3
    
    END) as column_alias FROM table;
    Dimitar, May 27, 2006
    #3

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