Rails 4 + SQL Lite: Find records with substring of big string?

Question

I want to do the opposite of this:

image_name = "blah"

Pipe.where("LOWER(name) like ?", "%#{image_name.downcase}%") (this would find a Pipe named 'blahzzz`)

What I want is the opposite, where I have a pipe named ah and given image_name = "blah", I want to be able to find that Pipe. How would I accomplish this?

Answer 1

i think what you are looking for is a functionality of a full-text search index like lucene. search for sunspot or tire, they provide bindings for solr and elasticsearch. those are the most common full-text servers out there.

if you want to find partials of text, there is a feature called n-gram that allows you to find matching parts or substrings. i think that would be the way to go on a larger scale.

if you have just one place, where you are going to implement this functionality and your database is not too large, you can mimic the behavior in a relational database by combining a lot of OR LIKE queries and providing substrings of the input.