Question

It’s pretty straightforward to strip out non-alphanumeric characters out from the search term, but how do you compare it to only the non-alphanumeric characters of values in the database?

For example, if I search for stack's, how can I get it to match both stacks and stack's?

What do I need to do to the what-do-i-do variable below to make the above happen?

SELECT * FROM table WHERE <what-do-i-do> ilike 'stacks'

Answer 1

One way to do this is with translate:

select *
from table
where translate(lower(WhatIDo), translate(lower(WhatIDo), 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', ''), '') = 'stacks'

The inner translate finds all non-alpha characters. The outer then removes these from the string.