ActiveRecord find starts with

Question

Really simple question - how do I do a search to find all records where the name starts with a certain string in ActiveRecord. I\'ve seen all sorts of bits all over the internet

Answer 1

Now it's 2012 I thought I'd throw in this update to narsk's answer.

named_scope became simply scope a while ago so the example becomes

class User
  scope :name_starts_with, lambda {|str|
    :conditions => ['lower(name) like ?', "#{str.downcase}%"]
  }
end

Note I removed the first % from narsk's solution as the OP is asking for a 'starts_with' not a 'contains' match.

Now you can do things like

User.name_starts_with("b").each do {|bs| puts bs.inspect}
bob = User.name_starts_with("bob").first

… etc

Note that scopes always return collections, never individual results. That threw me when I was first starting out with AR and I still manage to forget that every now and again.