Get matching names from SQL Server

Question

My problem is, I have a database of people names and their achievements. Now, I have some paragraphs which contains the person names. I need to extract the names from those paragraphs. The web-end of the application will append a hyperlink of the extracted names with their activities.

Data in my database might look like:

Name          |  Achievement
----------------------------------------                              
Steve Jobs    |  Founder of Apple
Bill Gates    |  Founder of Microsoft

Now I have string like: After saving up some money, Steve Jobs took off for India in the search of enlightenment.

I need to find Steve Jobs from the above string and add to hyper link to that. Any idea how to do this?

Answer 1

You should save your data in some pre defined format for example, you can use *** at the start & end of person name like.

After saving up some money, ***Steve Jobs*** took off for India in the search of enlightenment.

Then you can extract the Person Names by finding *** through sql

EDIT:

I myself will try to find some other way to do it. For example i will save the Person Names in separate columns.

Answer 2

SQL Server really isn't the best place to do this, because a hyperlink is by definition HTML, but...

declare @s varchar(500) = 'After saving up some money, Steve Jobs took off for India in the search of enlightenment.'

select 
    @s = REPLACE(@s, name, '<a href="#">'+name+'</a>')    
from yourtable
where @s like '%'+name+'%'
select @s