Dynamically changing the value in a column when it equals a certan value

Question

I have a column of values that print out N/A. Instead of N/A, I'd like to print three dashes. One thing to note is that some of the values in the column are not N/A so I need to print those. Basically I want to substitute the N/A for "---". Can someone please tell me how I can do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

SELECT IF(STRCMP(my_column,'N/A'),my_column,'---')
 FROM my_table

Answer 2

you can try the following. case statement documentation for mysql can be found here.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/case-statement.html

case
  when field = 'N/A' then '---'
  else field
end

Answer 3

How about this?

SELECT field1, field2, IF(field3='N/A','---',field3) AS field3 FROM table

Or did I misunderstood your question?

Answer 4

This is a revised version of ChssPly76's answer:

SELECT IF(field_name = 'N/A', '---', field_name) AS field_name
FROM table

This should correct the problem where all fields are printing out as --- and you will also have a properly named column in your results.