i want to check if a string contains a field value as a substring or not.
select * from mytable where instr("mystring", column_name);
but this does not search on word boundaries.
select * from mytable where instr("mystring", concat('[[:<:]]',column_name,'[[:>:]]');
does not work either. how to correct this?
You can do this using the REGEXP
operator:
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE 'mystring' REGEXP CONCAT('[[:<:]]', column_name, '[[:>:]]');
Note, however, that this is slow. You might be best off using the MySQL's FULLTEXT
search feature if you care about words. Or do a normal InStr()
check then filter the results.
If you don't need the return value of the instr
use like
instead
select * from mytable where column_name like '%mystring%';
As already discussed in the question you asked yesterday, no indexes can be used and performance is going to be bad, but this could work:
select *
from mytable
where 'mystring' = column_name -- exact match
or 'mystring' like concat('% ', column_name) -- word at the end
or 'mystring' like concat(column_name, ' %') -- word at beginning
or 'mystring' like concat('% ', column_name, ' %') -- word in the middle