Question

I need to match certain string with wildcards, pretty much like with SQL LIKE. While there are similar questions on this topic, I am using Unity3D and while its Mono.NET library has LINQ, it doesn’t have SqlMethods.

I would need to a way to emulate all the wild card characters. So '*MSB' should be able to match EastMSB, WestMSB, and DB0?-?? should match ‘DB01-11’, ‘DB01-07’ and etc.

Answer 1

Linq is able to expand methods of System.String class like Contains into appropriate SQL queries so, the following query:

var data = dataContext.Clients.Where(c => c.Name.Contains("John"));

would be “translated” into something like:

DECLARE @p0 VarChar(1000) = '%John%'
SELECT [t0].[Id], [t0].[Name]
FROM [Clients] as [t0]
WHERE [t0].[Name] LIKE @p0

At least, this is what I am getting using LinqPad.