filtering by 'contains' not working for similar values even with quotes

[DesiLogi]

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out how to filer records with a text field that contains comma delimited values.  The problem is the search doesn't actually recognize 'delimited' in a field and so 'contains' will bring up records that I need to filter out. 

For example, if a record's text field has a value of 1,2,3,4,12,22 the user might do a search/filter; "‘contains 2” (it can’t do = 2 because the actual value of the field is “1,2,3,4,12,22” and “2” won’t be equal to it).  But the ‘contains’ function will bring up records with not only ‘2’ in them but also ’12’ and ’22’ etc. 

I tried using "" in the search box so "2" would bring up records with just 2 and not 12 or 22, etc, but this doesn't work either. Does anyone know how to deal with this? I can't use List for data type as these records are imported and you can't import to List fields. The value 1,2,3,4,12,22 denotes a multi-record, meaning that record is related to 6 different records in another table. 

Thanks for any help!

[Hastur]

Hello @DesiLogi

To implement this you may change your table design.
Example:

You have two tables. Table 1 is the parent table and Table 2 is the child table. Unique id's of the first table are "a", "b" and "c". Unique id's of the first table are "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6" and "7".
You need to create third table to connect these tables. 
example:
tabe1_id   table2_id
a                    1
a                    2
a                    5
b                    3
b                    4
b                    6
c                    2
c                    6
c                    7

Then, you may create a View to gather all the data and use this View as the source for your Reports.
Here you can find helpful information related to Many-to-Many relationship -