How do I prepend string to a field value in MySQL?

Question

I have a huge table of products from a specific vendor with a UPC column. I need to differentiate these products' UPCs from other vendors. The current idea is to prepend all of these UPCs with the letter a.

UPDATE abc_items SET upc = 'a' + upc

is basically how I imagine doing something like this, but I know it will not work.

Maybe this would be a good time to look at normalizing your database. — Dan Bracuk, Aug 30 '17 at 14:34
I'm not sure what you are trying to do exactly as there is no `WHERE` condition for example, but adding a column / re-thinking your database design would seem a better idea than prefixing values. — jeroen, Aug 30 '17 at 14:35
@jeroen | This table contains products from a single vendor. We have many vendors that sell us the same products, with the same UPCs. This solution is so we can differentiate which vendor a specific product came from. Anyways, I'm just a dev :/ ... — ma77c, Aug 30 '17 at 14:48
Possible duplicate of [How to prepend a string to a column value in MySQL?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/680801/how-to-prepend-a-string-to-a-column-value-in-mysql) — Burgi, Nov 09 '18 at 15:36

score 27 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Just use the CONCAT function.

CONCAT(str1,str2,...)

Returns the string that results from concatenating the arguments. May have one or more arguments. If all arguments are nonbinary strings, the result is a nonbinary string. If the arguments include any binary strings, the result is a binary string. A numeric argument is converted to its equivalent nonbinary string form.

UPDATE abc_items SET upc = CONCAT('k', upc)

How do I prepend string to a field value in MySQL?

1 Answers1