Question

Let us say I have a table users table with a column name and it has the following records:

• charlie
• sheen
• charl
• een
• arnold

Can I get the records that will match with “charlie sheen” without looping each item?

To be more specific: Is there a way to fetch records that contain fields that are substrings of a given string?

Answer 1

Well, you can do what you want:

select * from people
    where 'charlie sheen' regexp name;

See the SQLFiddle example.

Keep in mind that this will be inefficient, though: by the very nature of the problem, you will have to treat every single row as a regex to see if it matches.

There will also be problems if the name column could contain characters that have a special meaning within a regex.

Edit: also worth mentioning is that if you allow non-trusted users to enter names in the database (such as from a website), treating it as a regex is a potential security problem.