SUBSTRING

substring

description

Syntax

VARCHAR substring(VARCHAR str, INT pos[, INT len])

The forms without a len argument return a substring from string str starting at position pos. The forms with a len argument return a substring len characters long from string str, starting at position pos. It is also possible to use a negative value for pos. In this case, the beginning of the substring is pos characters from the end of the string, rather than the beginning. A negative value may be used for pos in any of the forms of this function. A value of 0 for pos returns an empty string.

For all forms of SUBSTRING(), the position of the first character in the string from which the substring is to be extracted is reckoned as 1.

If len is less than 1, the result is the empty string.

example

mysql> select substring('abc1', 2);
+-----------------------------+
| substring('abc1', 2)        |
+-----------------------------+
| bc1                         |
+-----------------------------+

mysql> select substring('abc1', -2);
+-----------------------------+
| substring('abc1', -2)       |
+-----------------------------+
| c1                          |
+-----------------------------+

mysql> select substring('abc1', 0);
+----------------------+
| substring('abc1', 0) |
+----------------------+
|                      |
+----------------------+

mysql> select substring('abc1', 5);
+-----------------------------+
| substring('abc1', 5)        |
+-----------------------------+
| NULL                        |
+-----------------------------+

mysql> select substring('abc1def', 2, 2);
+-----------------------------+
| substring('abc1def', 2, 2)  |
+-----------------------------+
| bc                          |
+-----------------------------+

keywords

SUBSTRING, STRING