Question

I ask because a thorough Google search returns no clue as to how to do this.

I am trying to pull an example of a column field which is rarely used and is unfortunately littered with newlines and dashes even in empty ones, so I can’t just ask for ones that have data. I need to ask for a column that has at least 10-15 characters or something like this. I can also imagine this query being useful for validating pre-existing data. I know about the validator that does this, but I’m not trying to validate, I’m trying to search.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Seems ActiveRecord does not support this. But you can do it anyway like (Mysql example)

Model.where("CHAR_LENGTH(text_field) = ?", 10)

in Postgres the same should work but in documentation it says to use char_length()

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Also what you could do is on saving the record store the size of the field with a callback

before_save {|r| r.text_field_size = r.text_field.size}

With this you can now query with that, wich will be DB agnostic.

Model.where(text_field_size: 10)