On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 19:31:11 +0200, Christian Rusa <christian@rusa.at> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I want to match a string against the database and get the closest
> (shorter) match.
> I was asking myself if its possible to realise this in SQL.
>
> So if the string is:
> abcdefg
>
> And in the database are entries like:
> a
> ab
> abc
>
> I just want to get back 'abc'.
>
> I looked around in the internet and the documentation but found no solution.
You could ORDER BY the length of the strings descending and use LIMIT
to return only one row.
You can write a regular expression to do the matching. Something like:
^(a(b(c(d(e(fg?)?)?)?)?)?$