ruby on rails - can you use activerecord to find substring of a field? (quick & dirty keyword finder)

Question

Suppose a database contains a field 'keywords' and sample records include: "pipe wrench" "monkey wrench" "crescent wrench" "crescent roll" "monkey bars"

is there a way in activerecord to find the records where the keyword field contains the substring "crescent"?

(It's just a quick and dirty lookup for a quick concept prototype)

Answer 1

Yeah, just use a LIKE statement in MySQL.

In Rails 2.x:

Table.find(:all, :conditions => ['keywords LIKE ?', '%crescent%'])

In Rails 3.x:

Table.where('keywords LIKE ?', '%crescent%').all