MySQL SELECT LIKE or REGEXP to match multiple words in one record

Solution 1:

Well if you know the order of your words.. you can use:

SELECT `name` FROM `table` WHERE `name` REGEXP 'Stylus.+2100'

Also you can use:

SELECT `name` FROM `table` WHERE `name` LIKE '%Stylus%' AND `name` LIKE '%2100%'

Solution 2:

I think that the best solution would be to use Regular expressions. It's cleanest and probably the most effective. Regular Expressions are supported in all commonly used DB engines.

In MySql there is RLIKE operator so your query would be something like:
SELECT * FROM buckets WHERE bucketname RLIKE 'Stylus|2100'
I'm not very strong in regexp so I hope the expression is ok.

Edit
The RegExp should rather be:

SELECT * FROM buckets WHERE bucketname RLIKE '(?=.*Stylus)(?=.*2100)'

More on MySql regexp support:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/regexp.html#operator_regexp

Solution 3:

You can just replace each space with %

SELECT `name` FROM `table` WHERE `name` LIKE '%Stylus%2100%'

Solution 4:

The correct solution is a FullText Search (if you can use it) https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-search.html

This nearly does what you want:

SELECT * FROM buckets WHERE bucketname RLIKE '(Stylus|2100)+.*(Stylus|2100)+';

SELECT * FROM buckets WHERE bucketname RLIKE '(Stylus|2100|photo)+.*(Stylus|2100|photo)+.*(Stylus|2100|photo)+.*';

But this will also match "210021002100" which is not great.