PostgreSQL wildcard LIKE for any of a list of words

Question

I have a simple list of ~25 words. I have a varchar field in PostgreSQL, let\'s say that list is [\'foo\', \'bar\', \'baz\']. I want to find any row in my table

Answer 1

You can use Postgres' SIMILAR TO operator which supports alternations, i.e.

select * from table where lower(value) similar to '%(foo|bar|baz)%';

Answer 2

One 'elegant' solution would be to use full text search: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/interactive/textsearch.html. Then you would use full text search queries.

Answer 3

All currently supported versions (9.5 and up) allow pattern matching in addition to LIKE.

Reference: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-matching.html

Answer 4

PostgreSQL also supports full POSIX regular expressions:

select * from table where value ~* 'foo|bar|baz';

The ~* is for a case insensitive match, ~ is case sensitive.

Another option is to use ANY:

select * from table where value  like any (array['%foo%', '%bar%', '%baz%']);
select * from table where value ilike any (array['%foo%', '%bar%', '%baz%']);

You can use ANY with any operator that yields a boolean. I suspect that the regex options would be quicker but ANY is a useful tool to have in your toolbox.

Answer 5

Actually there is an operator for that in PostgreSQL:

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE lower(value) ~~ ANY('{%foo%,%bar%,%baz%}');