Can I reuse a calculated field in a SELECT query?

Question

Is there a way to reuse a calculated field within a mysql statement. I get the error "unknown column total_sale" for:

SELECT 
    s.f1 + s.f2 as total_sale, 
    s.f1 / total_sale as f1_percent
FROM sales s

or do I have to repeat the calculation, which would make for a very long SQL statement if I added all the calculations I need.

SELECT 
    s.f1 + s.f2 as total_sale, 
    s.f1 / (s.f1 + s.f2) as f1_percent
FROM sales s

of course I can do all the calculations in my php program.

Answer 1

I have been testing the following and it seems to work all the time, maybe there is a reason for this, is it because I have predefined the variable @total_sales as being a value not a string, and have not redefined its type during the select statement ??

If I do the following

    set @total_sales = 0;

    SELECT 
       @total_sale := s.f1 + s.f2 as total_sale, 
      s.f1 / @total_sale as f1_percent
   FROM sales s