Introduction:

MySQL is a powerful relational database management system that is widely used for data storage and manipulation. One common task in database operations is converting integers to binary strings. While MySQL does not have a built-in function for this specific conversion, there are several approaches to achieve it. In this blog, we will explore multiple methods to convert an integer to a binary string in MySQL.

Method 1: Using CAST() Function

The CAST() function in MySQL is employed to convert data from one data type to another. To convert an integer to a binary string using this method, follow the query below:

SELECT CAST(number AS CHAR(64)) AS binary_string FROM your_table;

• We use the CAST() function to convert the integer column number to a character data type with a length of 64 (adjust the length as per the requirements).
• The resulting character data will represent the binary string of the original integer.

Output:

number | binary_string
-------|--------------
7      | 111
23     | 10111
45     | 101101

Method 2: Using BIN() Function

MySQL provides the BIN() function that converts an integer to its binary representation. However, it returns a binary number in numeric form, not as a string. To convert an integer to a binary string using this method, we can combine the BIN() function with the CONCAT() function:

SELECT CONCAT(BIN(number)) AS binary_string FROM your_table;

• The BIN() function converts the integer to its binary numeric representation.
• The CONCAT() function then converts the numeric binary representation to a string format, which will be our binary string.

Output:

number | binary_string
-------|--------------
7      | 111
23     | 10111
45     | 101101

Method 3: Manual Binary Conversion

In this approach, we manually convert the integer to a binary string by calculating each binary digit using bitwise operations. The following query demonstrates this method:

SELECT
  number,
  REVERSE(CONV(number, 10, 2)) AS binary_string
FROM
  your_table;

• The CONV() function converts the integer to a binary number in numeric form with base 2.
• The REVERSE() function is used to reverse the order of the binary digits to obtain the correct binary string representation.

Output:

number | binary_string
-------|--------------
7      | 111
23     | 10111
45     | 101101

Conclusion:

In this blog, we explored three different methods to convert an integer to a binary string in MySQL. Each method has its own advantages and limitations.

• Method 1 (CAST() Function) is simple and easy to use but requires specifying a fixed character length for the binary string.
• Method 2 (BIN() Function) provides a direct way to obtain the binary representation but returns a numeric binary format that needs further conversion to a string.
• Method 3 (Manual Binary Conversion) offers complete control over the binary string generation but involves a more complex query.