mysql: get all characters before blank

Question

i would like to get all the characters in a field before the blank

if field1 = "chara ters"

i want it to return chara

what would this select statement look like?

Answer 1

You would need some string operations for that. Assuming every field has at least one space character:

SELECT SUBSTR(field1, 0, LOCATE(' ', field1)) FROM your_table;

Safe approach:

SELECT IF(
    LOCATE(' ', field1),
    SUBSTR(field1, 0, LOCATE(' ', field1)),
    field1
) FROM your_table;

Answer 2

SELECT LEFT(field1,LOCATE(' ',field1))