We have numerous identical tables with a varchar column that holds data
like this: "0 0 0 1 0 1 0 25 7 0 139 0 9". Essentially there are a bunch
of integers with a single space as a separator. There _should_ be no more
than 30 entries ( and 29 spaces ), but sometimes the system misfires and
there are more or less. Is there a MySQL solution to getting a count of
the spaces present in the field, figuring that spaces + 1 will equal
entries? It's fairly straight forward using a PHP application, but I'd
like to get the DB server to accomplish this task. Not having much luck
finding a solution in the manual.

Thanks,

David