Question

I am wondering if i can put something in my query which searches for a word within a string. For example, if i have a field named user_purchased, i want to query it and pull only records where the word ‘dog’ exists within the string.

I know i can do this using php like this

(!stristr($row['user_purchased'], 'dog'))

BUT, i’m wondering if i can do this in the query itself instead and that this will perhaps speed up performance.

Thanks in advance for help on this

Answer 1

You can use LIKE:

WHERE your_col LIKE '%dog%'

If you want better performance you could look at a full text search. This uses a FULLTEXT index to quickly find the matching rows.