Searching for partial text within a column - sql

Question

I have a search field in an admin system where a user can enter search criteria to find a product to edit within their shop. Some of the product names are long and similar. For example I have multiple product names with measurements in them. Here is an example:
Widget Brown Bull Edge Stone 400x500x600
Widget Brown Bull Snow Stone 700x500x300
There are about a hundred products like this, similar in name with only slight variations in either colour, size or description.
I've tried using regEx without much luck, I've also tried variations of LIKE without luck either unfortunately.
I want to be able to enter search criteria in my HTML form field and use SQL to limit the results based on the amount of search criteria I enter.
For example if I entered:
"Widget Brown 400" in the search field I can't use %like% in the where clause as it won't match that pattern.
My ideal result would be for me to enter Widget Brown 400 and the list of results would show those products that match that search criteria.

Answer 1

As commnented by Gordon Linoff, the best approach would be to settle for SQL-Server full text search.
Apart from that, another, less elegant and performant solution would be to use table valued function STRING_SPLIT() (available in SQL Server 2016), to turn the search words to a derived table, and then search each individual word in the text using LIKE. If all searched words are present in the text, then you have a match.
Consider:
SELECT *
FROM mytable t
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1
FROM STRING_SPLIT(#search, ' ') x
WHERE t.txt NOT LIKE '%' + x.value + '%'
);
Demo on DB Fiddle
CREATE TABLE mytable (id int, txt varchar(max));
INSERT INTO mytable VALUES
(1, 'Widget Brown Bull Edge Stone 400x500x600'),
(2, 'Widget Brown Bull Snow Stone 700x500x300');
DECLARE #search NVARCHAR(400) = 'Widget Brown 400';
SELECT *
FROM mytable t
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1
FROM STRING_SPLIT(#search, ' ') x
WHERE t.txt NOT LIKE '%' + x.value + '%'
);
id | txt
-: | :---------------------------------------
1 | Widget Brown Bull Edge Stone 400x500x600