Hi,

I need to build an SQL search query to find a row that is the longest part of the start of another string.

e.g.

search string - "helloworld"

rows in database

hellowo
elloworld


I would need it to match hellowo.

My current query I'm runing is..

select * from list where helloworld RLIKE list ORDER BY LENGTH(list) DESC

However, this would actually match "elloworld" as the first result. I need the query to return only results that start as the search string, not just contain it.

Can anybody point me in the right direction?

I have tried running a query for an exact match, and if it doesn't find one, it knocks a character off the end and re runs it. This works but makes the script run very very slowly and hammers my CPU.

Maybe this?

select * from table where 'helloworld' like concat(list,'%') order by length(list) desc limit 1