MySQL query String contains

Question

I've been trying to figure out how I can make a query with MySQL that checks if the value (string $haystack ) in a certain column contains certain data (string $needle), like this:

mysql_query("
SELECT *
FROM `table`
WHERE `column`.contains('{$needle}')
");

In PHP, the function is called substr($haystack, $needle), so maybe:

WHERE substr(`column`, '{$needle}')=1

Answer 1

Quite simple actually:

mysql_query("
SELECT *
FROM `table`
WHERE `column` LIKE '%{$needle}%'
");

The % is a wildcard for any characters set (none, one or many). Do note that this can get slow on very large datasets so if your database grows you'll need to use fulltext indices.