How to search for Soundex() substrings in MySQL?

Question

i got a problem with the Joomla! 3 integrated search engine. This engine\'s indexer creates so called soundex-values when indexing content like, for example

Answer 1

You're probably looking to calculate the Levenshtein distance; but if you simply want to find those records that start with something that sounds similar to the search term, you can strip any trailing 0 (which is merely used for padding) and then search for soundex strings with the resulting prefix:

WHERE t.soundex LIKE CONCAT(TRIM(TRAILING '0' FROM SOUNDEX('test')), '%')