Question

Is there a way to do a MySQL query for data fields that start with but may not fully contain a given string?

For instance, if I had the following list of data items:

my_table
1. example.com
2. example.com/subpage
3. subdomain.example.com
4. ain.example.com
5. ple.com

I would like to feed

• “example.com/subpage” and return #1, #2
• “example.com” and return #1
• “wexample.com” and return nothing
• “exa” and return nothing
• “subdomain.example.com/subpage” and return #3

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Given:

CREATE TABLE paths ( path VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL );

Searching for “example.com/subpage” would require the following query:

SELECT * FROM paths WHERE INSTR("example.com/subpage", path) = 1;

Just don’t try to run it over a large dataset frequently…

Docs: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_instr