I have a table column that holds the description which looks like this:
id description
--------------------------------------
100 ... post-doctorate ...
200 ... postdoctorate ...
300 ... post doctorate ...
I implemented a searching mechanism where users can search for keywords and somehow I'm having issues searching for these words. Even though I'm using LIKE in my WHERE clause I can't seem to include all 3 rows above.
Query
WHERE description LIKE '%post-doctorate%'
I would like to be able to search all 3 of them using any of the variations illustrated as my keyword.
I also looked at using SOUNDEX but even that doesn't work.
Please Note
Kindly ignore the fact that I'm not using parameterized queries in here. I'm aware of what it is and how to use it but this was an old project I created.
A method using like is:
WHERE description LIKE '%post%doctorate%'
But that is much more general than you want. So, use regular expressions:
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(description, 'post[- ]?doctorate'
Or, if you want to allow any character to appear at most once:
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(description, 'post(.)?doctorate'
Related
I don't really know SQL very well, but I've run into an issue where I receive data like this:
Account Name
Tags
Demo
Tag A,Tag C,Tag E
I need to write some SQL that will take the above table of data, and convert it over to this:
Account Name
Tags
Demo
Tag A
-------------
----------------------
Demo
Tag C
-------------
----------------------
Demo
Tag E
It needs to be pretty dynamic and non specific, because the list of possible tag names will be constantly changing. The only constant is that they will be a comma separated list and I need to break them out into separate rows of data like above.
Am I missing something obvious here in SQL that accomplishes the goal?
I am not really an SQL developer, so I don't have many details to share on what I've tried so far. More just Google searches not turning up any function that appears to do what I need.
I have to write a select statement following the following pattern:
[A-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][A-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]
The only thing I'm sure of is that the first A-Z WILL be there. All the rest is optional and the optional part is the problem. I don't really know how I could do that.
Some example data:
B/0765/E 3
B/0765/E3
B/0764/A /02
B/0749/K
B/0768/
B/0784//02
B/0807/
My guess is that I best remove al the white spaces and the / in the data and then execute the select statement. But I'm having some problems writing the like pattern actually.. Anyone that could help me out?
The underlying reason for this is that I'm migrating a database. In the old database the values are just in 1 field but in the new one they are splitted into several fields but I first have to write a "control script" to know what records in the old database are not correct.
Even the following isn't working:
where someColumn LIKE '[a-zA-Z]%';
You can use Regular Expression via xQuery to define this pattern. There are many question in StackOverFlow that talk about patterns in DB2, and they have been solved with Regular Expressions.
DB2: find field value where first character is a lower case letter
Emulate REGEXP like behaviour in SQL
My query looks for dataset containing a particular label, let say:
SELECT * FROM Authors
WHERE Title LIKE #pattern
where #pattern is defined by user. So, %abc% would match abcd, 0abc, etc. Sometimes there are labels like
Xabc-ONE
blaYabc-TWO-sometext
Zabc-THREE
blubXabc-FOUR
and I'm looking for labels containing abc and ONE or TWO, something like %abc%(ONE|TWO)%. Is it possible?
You can add support for regular expressions to SQL Server via a CLR function, as shown in this answer, but it may not be possible for you in your environment. Check with your friendly sysadmin!
Maybe I don't understand your question right, but why not simply
SELECT * FROM Authors
WHERE Title LIKE '%abc%ONE%' OR '%abc%TWO%'
?
LIKE is just a search with wildcards, nothing more, so there's actually no other way of doing what you want with LIKE. If you need more, have a look into regular expressions. But be aware that it's slower than LIKE and in your case absolutely not necessary.
UPDATE:
From comments "don't want to care for what the user wants to match"...then simply do it like this:
SELECT * FROM Authors
WHERE Title LIKE CONCAT('%', $userInput, '%ONE%') OR CONCAT('%', $userInput, '%TWO%')
Or do I still don't get you right?
If you are using SQL Server you can enable the full text search engine and use the keyboards contains and near to find abc near ONE
I will say in the query(pseudo code)
Select something from table where CONTAINS(column_name, 'abc NEAR ONE')
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142568.aspx
I'm working on a faceted search in Coldfusion and SQL. I've tried creating a query like this:
SELECT * FROM Turbos
WHERE
PartNumber LIKE '%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%'
OR PartDescription LIKE '%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%'
AND (PumpingSpeed BETWEEN #minimum# AND #URL.speed#)
AND InletFlange LIKE '#URL.inlet#'
AND Bearing LIKE '#URL.bearing#'
AND Condition LIKE '#URL.condition#'
The problem is the server is returning rows that don't contain EVERY piece of data I'm supplying. How can I select ONLY those rows which contain all the criteria?
just wrap the OR bit in brackets:
(PartNumber LIKE '%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%' OR PartDescription LIKE '%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%') AND...
at the moment you have A or B and C which is being read as A or (B and C). You want (A or B) and C.
And make sure you use cfqueryparam as suggested above.
Just a guess really, but change
...'%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%' OR
PartDescription ...
to
...'%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%' AND
PartDescription ...
edit
or are you saying some have null values?
post comment edit
Imagine for example that InletFlange is empty for your part, and the user didn't put it in their search.
Then InletFlange LIKE '#URL.inlet#' will compare "" LIKE "", which is of course true, so the product shows up.
There are many ways to solve this. For example
Default the search criteria to "N/A" or something
Default the column in the database in a similar fashion.
something along the lines of AND NOT ISNULL(InletFlange,'')=='' for each criteria
Okay, I found the answers:
Leigh: +1 to clarifying the question. (It is
unlikely this has any bearing on the
results, but what is the point of
using LIKE without wildcards "%"? If
it is an equality comparison you are
after, just use equals ie ... AND
Condition = '#URL.condition#' )
You were quite right, I was missing the percent symbols in my LIKE comparisons (DUH!). I removed them earlier thinking they were the problem, but they weren't, this was:
Aiden: just wrap the OR bit in brackets:
(PartNumber LIKE '%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%' OR PartDescription LIKE '%#trim(SearchCriteria)#%') AND...
Thank you Aiden!
While this isnt an answer to your question - you might want to consider using a dedicated search solution such as Solr (which is included with CF9). Its a more powerful fulltext solution than just raw SQL and includes facetting
I want to show the closest related item for a product. So say I am showing a product and the style number is SG-sfs35s. Is there a way to select whatever product's style number is closest to that?
Thanks.
EDIT: to answer your questions. Well I definitely want to keep the first 2 letters as that is the manufacturer code but as for the part after the first dash, just whatever matches closest. so for example SG-sfs35s would match SG-shs35s much more than SG-sht64s. I hope this makes sense whenever I do LIKE product_style_number it only pulls the exact match.
There normally isn't a simple way to match product codes that are roughly similar.
A more SQL friendly solution is to create a new table that maps each product to all the products it is similar to.
This table would either need to be maintained manually, or a more sophisticated script can be executed periodically to update it.
If your product codes follow a consistent pattern (all the letters are the same for similar products, with only the numbers changing), then you should be able to use a regular expression to match the similar items. There are docs on this here...
It sounds like what you want is levenshtein distance .
Unfortunately, there isn't a built-in levenshtein function for mysql, but some folks have come up with a user-defined function that does it(deadlink).
You will probably want to do it as a stored procedure, as I expect that the algorithm may not be trivial.
For example, you may split the term at the -, so you have two parts. You do a LIKE query on each part and use that to make a decision.
You could just loop though, replacing the last character with "%" until you get at least one result, in your stored procedure.
Sounds like you need something like Lucene, though i'm not sure if that would be overkill for your situation. But it certainly would be able to do text searches and return the ones most similar first.
If you need something more simple I would try to start by searching with the full product code, then if that doesn't work try to use wildcards/remove some characters until you return a result.
JD Isaacks.
This situation of yours is very simple to solve.
It`s not like you need to use Artificial Intelligence like the Google.
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_wildcards.asp
Take a look at this manual at w3schools about wildcards to use with your SELECT code.
But also you will need to create a new table with 3 columns: LeftCode, RightCode and WildCard.
Example:
Rows on Table:
LeftCode = SG | RightCode = 35s | WildCard = SG-s_s35s
LeftCode = SG | RightCode = 64s | WildCard = SG-s_t64s
SQL Code
If the user typed the code that matches the row1 of the table:
SELECT * FROM PRODUCTS WHERE CODE LIKE "$WildCard";
Where $WildCard is the PHP variable containing the column 3 of the new table.
I hope I helped, even 4 years late...