User owning multiple items in mysql database -

so have few tables in database setup , i'm wondering best way is.

essentially have 1-to-many relationship single user can "own" multiple items, represented array in php, return unique item number, type, , values of item. how go storing in mysql table?

would best have lookup table of every single item along it's id , present owner? make more sense put line item in user table had csv list of every item owned every player (that nightmare index?)

what makes sense here?

example:

class character contains items[]

character 1 has following entries in items list:

1, 2, 5, 10,11,12

character 2 has following entries in items list:

3,4,6,7,8,9,13

what decent way store data?

thanks,

never, ever store delimited string values in database. normalize data creating many-to-many table instead. way you'll able query data.

that being said schema might like

create table characters  (     char_id int not null auto_increment primary key,      name varchar(32),     ... ) engine = innodb; create table items (     item_id int not null auto_increment primary key,      name varchar(6),     ... ) engine = innodb; create table item_list (     char_id int not null,      item_id int not null,     primary key (char_id, item_id),     foreign key (char_id) references characters (char_id),     foreign key (item_id) references items (item_id) ) engine = innodb; 

if later need produce delimited list of items per character can explode values while iterating on resultset can use query this

select char_id, group_concat(item_id) items   item_list -- ...  group char_id 

here sqlfiddle demo