SUBSTRING_INDEX() : Return a substring from a string before the specified number of occurrences of the delimiter

And if you look at the actual description you see that positive n (count of the delimiter) returns the string to the left of the delimiter whilst negative n (e.g. -2) return the substring to the right of the nth delimiter. Now image that the delimiter is ' ' (which can be explicitly stated in Mysql as '<space>').

In reply to Re^4: Truncate Data from MySQL by stevemayes
in thread Truncate Data from MySQL by rich731

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