Postgres matching against an array of regular expressions - sql

Question

My client wants the possibility to match a set of data against an array of regular expressions, meaning:
table:
name | officeId (foreignkey)
--------
bob | 1
alice | 1
alicia | 2
walter | 2
and he wants to do something along those lines:
get me all records of offices (officeId) where there is a member with
ANY name ~ ANY[.*ob, ali.*]
meaning
ANY of[alicia, walter] ~ ANY of [.*ob, ali.*] results in true
I could not figure it out by myself sadly :/.
Edit
The real Problem was missing form the original description:
I cannot use select disctinct officeId .. where name ~ ANY[.*ob, ali.*], because:
This application, stored data in postgres-xml columns, which means i do in fact have (after evaluating xpath('/data/clients/name/text()'))::text[]):
table:
name | officeId (foreignkey)
-----------------------------------------
[bob, alice] | 1
[anthony, walter] | 2
[alicia, walter] | 3
There is the Problem. And "you don't do that, that is horrible, why would you do it like this, store it like it is meant to be stored in a relation database, user a no-sql database for Document-based storage, use json" are no options.
I am stuck with this datamodel.

Answer 1

This looks pretty horrific, but the only way I can think of doing such a thing would be a hybrid of a cross-join and a semi join. On small data sets this would probably work pretty well. On large datasets, I imagine the cross-join component could hit you pretty hard.
Check it out and let me know if it works against your real data:
with patterns as (
select unnest(array['.*ob', 'ali.*']) as pattern
)
select
o.name, o.officeid
from
office o
where exists (
select null
from patterns p
where o.name ~ p.pattern
)
The semi-join helps protect you from cases where you have a name like "alicia nob" that would meet multiple search patterns would otherwise come back for every match.

Answer 2

You could cast the array to text.
SELECT * FROM workers WHERE (xpath('/data/clients/name/text()', xml_field))::text ~ ANY(ARRAY['wal','ant']);
When casting a string array into text, strings containing special characters or consisting of keywords are enclosed in double quotes kind of like {jimmy,"walter, james"} being two entries. Also when matching with ~ it is matched against any part of the string, not the same as LIKE where it's matched against the whole string.
Here is what I did in my test database:
test=# select id, (xpath('/data/clients/name/text()', name))::text[] as xss, officeid from workers WHERE (xpath('/data/clients/name/text()', name))::text ~ ANY(ARRAY['wal','ant']);
id | xss | officeid
----+-------------------------+----------
2 | {anthony,walter} | 2
3 | {alicia,walter} | 3
4 | {"walter, james"} | 5
5 | {jimmy,"walter, james"} | 4
(4 rows)