Thread: How to collect text-fields from multiple rows ?

  Hi,

how can I collect text-fields from multiple rows into one output row?
I'd like to do an equivalent to the aggregate function SUM() only for text.

The input is a select that shows among other things a numerical column 
where I would like to group by.
The text column of all rows in a group should get concatenated into 1 
text devided by a '\n'.

Even better would be if I could add a second text colum per line as topic.

Input e.g.
select  group_nr::integer, memo::text, topic::text ...

1, 'bla ', 'weather'
2, 'yada..', 'weather'
2, 'talk talk..', 'cooking'
2, 'words words, ...', 'poetry'
3, ....

Output:

1, 'weather\nbla...'
2, 'weather\nyada..\ncooking\ntalk talk..\npoetry\nwords words, ...'


Even better would be to get some kind of line-chars as optical devider 
between the topics.
Lets say 10 = above all topic-lines.

2, '==========\nweather\nyada..\n==========\ncooking\ntalk 
talk..\n==========\npoetry\nwords words, ...'

Andreas wrote on 16.10.2010 05:23:
> Hi,
>
> how can I collect text-fields from multiple rows into one output row?
> I'd like to do an equivalent to the aggregate function SUM() only for text.
>
> The input is a select that shows among other things a numerical column where I would like to group by.
> The text column of all rows in a group should get concatenated into 1 text devided by a '\n'.
>
> Even better would be if I could add a second text colum per line as topic.
>
> Input e.g.
> select group_nr::integer, memo::text, topic::text ...
>
> 1, 'bla ', 'weather'
> 2, 'yada..', 'weather'
> 2, 'talk talk..', 'cooking'
> 2, 'words words, ...', 'poetry'
> 3, ....
>
> Output:
>
> 1, 'weather\nbla...'
> 2, 'weather\nyada..\ncooking\ntalk talk..\npoetry\nwords words, ...'
>

If you are on 9.0:

SELECT group_nr, string_agg(memo||'--'||topic, '--')
FROM the_table_with_no_name
GROUP BY group_nr;

On 8.x you need to user array_agg()

SELECT group_nr, array_to_string(array_agg(memo||'--'||topic),'--')
FROM the_table_with_no_name
GROUP BY group_nr;