How to search for a substring in SQLite?

Question

Whats the most efficient way to search for a sub string in SQLite?

I\'m looking at the LIKE operator.

Do I have the right idea? Has this worked well for you?

Answer 1

Yepper, use Like. Select id from sometable where name like '%omm%' would return any row that had 'omm' anywhere in the name column.

Answer 2

You can use LIKE, but it gets really slow if the pattern you're searching for starts with '%' -- i.e., if the substring you're looking for isn't necessarily at the beginning of the field.

If you need to do such searches, consider using FTS3, which makes full-text searching considerably more efficient.

Answer 3

Years have passed since the question was asked and answered and in 2012 SQLite version 3.7.15 introduced a function instr( string, substring) - returns the location of a substring in a string, 0 if not found. (https://www.techonthenet.com/sqlite/functions/instr.php)

sqlite> SELECT instr('TechOnTheNet.com', 'T');
Result: 1

I have not benchmarked against LIKE, but IMHO could be faster.