How do i go about searching in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I would like to implement a simple search. Let's say the user enters 'york', then I would like to find all records that has a matching substring like 'new york' or 'yorkshire'.

So far I have figured out I will have to use the find method, but I can't figure out how to match for substrings.

Answer 1

city = params[:q]
User.find(:all, :conditions=>["city like :text", {:text=>"%#{city}%"} ] )

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at the Thinking Sphinx plugin for doing such full text search . Solr is also another option .