How can I pull this peice of data out of all the addresses If I select * from addresses?

According to your description you can't select * from addresses, because "addresses" is a column, not a table. If what you want to do is search for an address that matches a pattern, then the SQL you want is something like this: 

SELECT addresses FROM table_name WHERE addresses LIKE '%pattern%'

[download]

One worry here is that this SELECT is not guaranteed to return a unique value.

An alternative is to grab *all* the addresses into (say) an array in Perl and use grep to grab the ones you want. This will have the same problem as above, however. 

my @addresses;
my $sth= $db->prepare('SELECT addresses FROM table_name') or die "SQL 
+error: $DBI::errstr\n";
$sth->execute();
while (my $row = $sth->fetchrow) {
    push @addresses, $row;
}
my @matches = grep { /pattern/ } @addresses;

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Let me add my voice to the throng that says "NORMALIZE" though. It will make your life *soooooo* much easier.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

In reply to Re: Building an SQL query by arturo
in thread Building an SQL query by despair

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