Case-insensitive search in Rails model

ruby-on-rails activerecord case-insensitive
Jesper Rønn-Jensen picture Jesper Rønn-Jensen · Feb 8, 2010 · Viewed 124.8k times · Source

My product model contains some items

 Product.first
 => #<Product id: 10, name: "Blue jeans" >

I'm now importing some product parameters from another dataset, but there are inconsistencies in the spelling of the names. For instance, in the other dataset, Blue jeans could be spelled Blue Jeans.

I wanted to Product.find_or_create_by_name("Blue Jeans"), but this will create a new product, almost identical to the first. What are my options if I want to find and compare the lowercased name.

Performance issues is not really important here: There are only 100-200 products, and I want to run this as a migration that imports the data.

Any ideas?

Answer

alex.zherdev picture alex.zherdev · Feb 8, 2010

You'll probably have to be more verbose here

name = "Blue Jeans"
model = Product.where('lower(name) = ?', name.downcase).first 
model ||= Product.create(:name => name)

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