Using wildcards with GQL -- Google App Engine [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

Google App Engine: Is it possible to do a Gql LIKE query? (12 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

Is it possible to use a wildcard with GQL? I would like to be able to pull all records that contain a particular word somewhere in their values. I don't believe there is a "LIKE" filter. Here is basically what I am trying to do:
Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated-

mentors_with_topic = db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM MentorServices WHERE Services LIKE 'Reading'").get()

Answer 1

For what you want to do, you're probably best served using the search API (added in 1.7).

There are docs available, but essentially you create a new "search" index and "documents" which you must add to the index by creating them from your existing data. The search index is a different, fully searchable type of index which but which is still stored in your datastore.

---

As a hackish alternative to this, if you store the free text you want to search against in a StringListProperty (you will probably have to update your model and migrate your data to be split into individual words), then you can "search" against this with a simple equality operator (=) which is roughly equivalent to an in in python:

search_string = "Reading"
q = MentorServices.all()
q.filter("Services =", search_string)
q.fetch()

I strongly suggest using the search API instead of this, because:

• You have to migrate all of your TextProperty fields that you want to search to StringListProperty fields before this will work
• Using StringListProperty fields is not efficient for storing text
• The alternative search API was created precisely to avoid these kinds of solutions.

If you controlled how users entered the data, for example by having them enter a set of skills as tags, then they would be more easily saved as a StringListProperty and it would make more sense to search in this manner. For searching unstructured text, use the search API.