Efficient way of querying buddy list

[dolbex]

Ive been sitting here for an hour banging my head against the desk trying to figure out how to write a SQL statement that will return an array of users that are buddies on a specific user. I can pass the function the userid fine and I know that they reside in the vb3_usertextfield.buddylist field, I just don't know how to handle the contents so that I can then query the usernames without looping through an impload and querying for every single userid.

Any SQL junkies out there?