CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sqlregexpostgresqljoinpattern-matching
Josh
Josh

Reputation: 177

Use regex stored in a table as criteria for an SQL query

I have a table with regular expressions which I need to use to filter rows from another table.
Something like:

SELECT *
FROM a
WHERE foo SIMILAR TO '(SELECT regex FROM b)'

Obviously, that doesn't work because that isn't the syntax and there are multiple rows in b that I need to iterate through.

I'm using PostgreSQL 8.3.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 332

Answers (1)

David Faber
David Faber

Reputation: 12485

Perhaps doing a join would work? E.g.

SELECT a.*, b.regex
  FROM a JOIN b ON a.foo ~ b.regex

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with Postgres to say for certain, but this would be the ordinary way in SQL of iterating over rows. It should return a.foo multiple times if multiple regexes are matched.

Upvotes: 5

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