in MySQL, I have a row for each user, with a column that contains friends names separated by .
eg.
Friend1
Friend2
Friend3
I'd like to be able to quickly search all the users where the Friends field contains Friend2.
I've found FIND_IN_SET
but that only works for commas and the data can contains commas and foreign characters.
Obviously searching with regular expressions and the such will be slow. I'm new to the whole cross referencing so I'd love some help on the best way to structure the data so that it can be found quickly.
Thanks in advance.
Edit: Ok, I forgot to mention a point that the data is coming from a game where friends names are stored locally and there are no links to another users ID. Thus the strings. Every time they connect I am given a dump of their friends names which I use in the background to help match games.