Why is CONCAT not piecing together strings?

[chopin]

I have a table `city` that contains four cities (a,b,c,d)

I am trying to concatenate the city with a string. It is important that the city must come first:

CONCAT(`city`, ' text') should do the trick, but I am getting the following:

a
b
c
d text

However if I reverse the CONCAT order to CONCAT('text ', `city`), then I get the proper string attachments:

text a
text b
text c
text d

What does this behavior indicate?

[Jerry Winston]

I agree, that's the wrong output but what does your SQL statement look like? It's going to be tough to figure out the problem with your query without the query.

However, I did notice you have something funky going on with the single quote marks around your "text" and "city" string literals. Try deleting the single quotes and reapplying them. It looks like you picked up some odd characters by copy/pasting.

[mwasif]

It should work. Try CONCAT_WS() instead of CONCAT().

SELECT CONCAT(' ', `city`, 'text') FROM table

[dgreenhouse]

You are using backticks "`" as Jerry Winston noted around "city." Change them to either apostrophes or quotation marks.