How can I check to see if a string exists in any ActiveRecord in a table?

Question

Would this require full-text search or is it possible to do with a method?

I have a table of Chinese sentences and I want to find all the records that include a string.

For example:

irb(main):007:0> Hint.all
  Hint Load (0.7ms)  SELECT "hints".* FROM "hints" 
[
    [0] #<Hint:0x007fb99c9d1900> {
                :id => 107,
          :sentence => "你叫什么名字？",
              :user => nil,
           :learned => nil,
        :created_at => Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:04:06 UTC +00:00,
        :updated_at => Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:04:06 UTC +00:00
    },
    [1] #<Hint:0x007fb99f2acc30> {
                :id => 108,
          :sentence => "当时有约翰做他们的助手。",
              :user => nil,
           :learned => nil,
        :created_at => Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:04:23 UTC +00:00,
        :updated_at => Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:04:23 UTC +00:00
    },
    [2] #<Hint:0x007fb99f2ac618> {
                :id => 109,
          :sentence => "马可和家人可能过着舒适的生活，因为他们在城里有自己的房子，家里有仆人。",
              :user => nil,
           :learned => nil,
        :created_at => Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:19:43 UTC +00:00,
        :updated_at => Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:19:43 UTC +00:00
    }
]

I want to search for "名字" and it return a list of records that have that string in the sentence table. In this case it would find a match in [0].

(if full-text search is required, can you recommend something that will work with Chinese and heroku, as close to free as possible?)

Answer 1

您可以做这样的事情吗，还是我缺少有关Unicode符号的东西？

Hint.where("sentence LIKE '%名字%'")