I have the_table:
col_1 , col_2
---------------
cook , cook the cookies
I would like to place a function inside of col_2 that reads the value of col_1 and then inserts that value into the col_2:
col_1 , col_2
----------------
cook , col_1.value the cookies
my question is why? you can put what ever you want inside the column but I believe mysql doesn't support subqueries which is what it sounds like what you are trying to do.
I believe postgressehttp://www.postgresql.org/ does, as well as oraclehttp://www.oracle.com if you want complete overkill.
hello phpscott and weirdan; thanks for your responses;
the example I posted is a simplified situation; ultimately I will need to go into a cell and replace some string with some other string; there are several php things I could do to do pattern matches within the query result in order to find an identified placeholder in a table;
however as with any pattern matching there is a large potential for problems; for instance if you are looking for 'cook' a simple pattern match would find 'cook' and also the c-o-o-k in 'cookies';
I cannot concat because I have no control over the table values nor any control over what a user may want to change a value to;
so it seems that the best solution is to embed a function that refers to another table cell;