MySQL: Use CONCAT to include text in SELECT results

The CONCAT function in MySQL allows SELECT statements to act like printf commands by mingling text and query results together.

For example, to generate a quick list of links in HTML from a table ‘links’ with the columns ‘url’ (http://www.tech-recipes.com) and ‘title’ (Tech-Recipes) so that the output looks like:

Tech-Blog

use a select statement like:

SELECT CONCAT('<a href="', url, '">', title, '</a><br />') FROM links;

The CONCAT function simply joins the comma-separated list of strings and expressions (in this case column results from the query: url and title). As with any SELECT statement, the result set can be varied with the use of an optional WHERE clause and other valid SQL syntax.