Thanks for the replies. David, I would have normalized it to 2 or more tables, but the number of bar-delimited are not fixed and as new data are added the maximum number of these values may change. Also, the problem with like I think is that matching is not strict and thus might give spurious hits.
Arjen's solution(haven't tried yet) looks better to me. -Neel On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Arjen Nienhuis <a.g.nienh...@gmail.com>wrote: > On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:44 AM, san man <neelakas...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hello all, >> >> I am trying to do a SELECT operation with a WHERE condition. However, the >> column with which I am trying to do the comparison has several values which >> are pipe-delimited. I want to return a match(true) if the WHERE condition >> matches any of the bar-delimited values. >> >> For example, SELECT id WHERE synonyms = 'word'; >> >> Here synonyms is a pipe-delimited field and I want to match "word" with >> any of the values of the synonyms fields. >> >> > SELECT id FROM t WHERE 'word' = ANY(regexp_split_to_array(synonyms, > '[|]')); > > With postgres it's possible to make an index > on regexp_split_to_array(synonyms, '[|]')) for some extra speed. But its > better to store the synonyms as an array in the first place. > > Thanks in advance. >> >> Neel >> > >
