Is it possible to use characters instead of a position in a substring function?

Answer 1

In your LOCATE statement, you are searching for an empty string '' instead of a space ' '

Add a space character.

What you are doing will fetch the string from its second character to the first occurrence of a space character. Is this really what you want to do? What if the the first or second character are space characters?

Answer 2

You can use SUBSTRING_INDEX for that:

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(title, ' ', 1) FROM table
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX('hello world', ' ', 1) # gives you 'hello'

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.htm

Answer 3

You could use:

SUBSTRING(title,2,charindex('',title)-1)

This would cut the string just before the space in the title