About

As you may have gathered from the FAQ, I use SQL a lot day to day.  Quite often I'm presented with a list of values and requested that I get further details for the relevant rows.  I'm not really talking about in a program, or indeed in a report.  This is more the Ad-Hoc queries that arrise from time to time. 

So taking that example, I have a SQL statement, which is something like SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE MyID IN (<My List>).  And someone has helpfully provided me with a list of ID's:

123
54
910
432
434

But what I really need for the SQL Statement above, is 123,54,910,432,434.  As you can see, separated with commas.  For a short list, it's not too bad, you can do the equivalent of playing an old 8bit computer game, and do the down, comma down, comma action a few times.  For lists of 20+ this gets a bit waring, and for 100's, well it's just silly.  Even more so if you have to go through and add quotes before and after.  That leads to a bit more keying and the odd mistake.

So I wrote this site to make it all a bit easier for me, and also give you the chance to use it as well.

In the interests of fairness at this point, it's worth saying there are other ways to achieve this, I started to mention them in the FAQ, but here's a few off the top of my head:

• Import the data into a DB table (perhaps created just for this), and then join that in the Query.

• Put the list in Excel, and then save as CSV, which may give you the right output.

• Put the list in Excel and then use a formula, to add any quotes and commas.

I'll leave it to you to decide if your way, or one of the above is better suited to your particular data and task needs.  I'm not for one second saying this is better than anything else, nor that I use it in every scenario, however I have found it very very helpful in many scernarious, and will continue to use it.

As mentioned in the FAQ the site doesn't try and store your data, and there is no database powering this site.  We don't charge for use of the site, but in return we don't offer any warranties or guarantees.

Updates

13-Feb-2019: https://ipv6.commaquote.com now a site. Yes, an IPv6 hosted version of this site. Run on my home servers, so may be less stable than Azure. But Azure won't do IPv6 without lots of cost and complexity

18-Dec-2015: Changed user interaction validation, it should now allow you to change output, eg to quoted comma seperated even if you've not changed the input. Sometimes we forget to select the output, and have to re-paste the input. This removes that need. Thanks for your patience.

16-Apr-2015:  Added Bootstrap UI elements to make the site a) more modern and b) a bit more responsive.  It's not really something that would be too useful on a mobile platform, but should have the benefit of working better in different screen resolutions.

07-Jun-2014: Moved to Azure.  Uptime of my home system hasn't been great of late, and I wanted to make this site accessible as often as possible.  The Azure hosting is using the free "website" mode (well, as stated I don't need a database or any local storage), so SLA and performance are not guaranteed, but it should be pretty good.

25-Jan-2014:  Odd traffic.  You may have noticed the google advertising.  One thing that I've noticed over the past few months, is thousands of succesive visits, but no advertising revenue.  This suggests to me either bot style visits, or some automation.  While I'm honoured/surprised at this, it's not really in the spirit of this place.  Firstly it uses bandwidth and server resources, far in excess of most users (for an entire year!), and secondly as mentioned it doesn't earn any advertising income, so doesn't pay for any use.  Now I only get pennies from the advertising, but it all helps pay for the frugal normal usage.  This took things beyond.  So now there's some extra checks to ensure it's human or similar useage.