From: "Jonathan Lam" <lamj@spawar.navy.mil>
To: <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Closes Match
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:57:11 -0700
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-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-sql-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-sql-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Bruno Wolff III
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 10:50 AM
To: Christian Rusa
Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [SQL] Closes Match

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 19:31:11 +0200,
  Christian Rusa <christian@rusa.at> wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I want to match a string against the database and get the closest 
> (shorter) match.
> I was asking myself if its possible to realise this in SQL.
> 
> So if the string is:
> abcdefg
> 
> And in the database are entries like:
> a
> ab
> abc
> 
> I just want to get back 'abc'.
> 
> I looked around in the internet and the documentation but found no
solution.

You could ORDER BY the length of the strings descending and use LIMIT
to return only one row.

You can write a regular expression to do the matching. Something like:
^(a(b(c(d(e(fg?)?)?)?)?)?$

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