Question

Hey my first question on SO! Anywho…

Still relatively a newb at SQL so I think I might be missing something here. My question is I currently have a table full of phone numbers. I want to have a query where I search for phone numbers that are similar to a list I have. So for example, I want to find phone numbers that begin with ‘555123’, ‘555321’, and ‘555987’. I know normally if you have a list of numbers you could just do a query such as

SELECT * 
  FROM phonenumbers 
 WHERE number in ('5551234567', '5559876543', .... );

Is there a way to do this with like? Such as

SELECT * 
  FROM phonenumbers 
 WHERE number in like ('555123%', '555321%', '555987%'); //I know this doesn't actually work

Instead of have to do this individually

SELECT * 
  FROM phonenumbers 
 WHERE number like '555123%' 
    or number like '555321%' 
    or number like '555987%'; //Which does work but takes a long time

Or is there an easier to do this that I’m just missing? I’m using postgres, I don’t know if there’s any commands it has that would help out with that. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use SIMILAR TO and separate the tags with | pipe '555123%|555321%|555987%'

eg:

SELECT * 
FROM phonenumbers 
WHERE number SIMILAR TO '555123%|555321%|555987%'