SQL: Refactoring a GROUP_CONCAT query

My eventual goal is to generate tag links for blog posts, the tags relating to the post.

Currently my query has a GROUP_CONCAT which grabs relating tags and the returning tags column value is something like:

'Brooklyn, Manhattan, New York'

from

SELECT 
post.id, 
post.name, 
GROUP_CONCAT( tags.name order by tags.name ) AS tags 
FROM post 
LEFT JOIN tags_items
  ON post.id = tags_items.post
LEFT JOIN t开发者_运维问答ags
  ON tags_items.tag = tags.id

With this string, in my server-side code I'm splitting it up by the comma and looping through to generate tags. However, now I need to make these links and I need to know the respective id of each of the tags in order to generate a link such as <a href="?tag=1">New York</a>. My HTML structure will be as such:

<div class=post>
  <h2>Rakim Allah!</h2>
  <div class=tags>
    <a href="/tags/1">Brooklyn</a>
    <a href="/tags/2">Manhattan</a>
    <a href="/tags/3">New York</a>
  </div>
</div>

tags table:

id    name
1     Brooklyn
2     Manhattan

tags_items table ( no pk ):

post  tag
1     1

You could try adding the ID to each item in the group list w/ a different delimiter:

SELECT post.id, post.name, 
GROUP_CONCAT( CONCAT(tags.id, ';', tags.name) order by tags.name ) AS tags 
FROM post 
LEFT JOIN tags 
          ON post.id = tags.post_id;

Now you'd just have to do an additional split on semi-colons to get the id and name.