In response to Peter Geoghegan <peter.geoghegan86@xxxxxxxxx>: > Hello, > > At the moment, users of my application, which runs on 8.4.3, may > search for products in a way that is implemented roughly like this: > > SELECT * FROM products WHERE description ILIKE '%%usr_string%%'; > > This works reasonably well. However, I thought it would be a nice > touch to give my users leeway to spell product names incorrectly when > searching, or to not have to remember if a product is entered as "coca > cola", "CocaCola" or "Coca-cola". At the moment, they don't have to > worry about case sensitivity because I use ILIKE - I'd like to > preserve that. I'd also like to not have it weigh against them heavily > when they don't search for a specific product, but just a common > substring. For example, if they search for "coca-cola", there may be a > number of different coca-cola products: "CocaCola 330ml can", > "Coca-Cola 2 litre bottle", but no actual plain "cocacola". That ought > to not matter too much - all cocacola products should be returned. > > This isn't important enough for me to be willing to add a big > dependency to my application. I'd really prefer to limit myself to the > contrib modules. pg_trgm and fuzzystrmatch look very promising, but > it's not obvious how I can use either to achieve what I want. > Postgres's built-in regex support may have a role to play too. > > I can live with it not being indexable, because typically there are > only tens of thousands of products in a production system. > > Could someone suggest an approach that is reasonably simple and > reasonably generic ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/fuzzystrmatch.html -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
