Is STRING in any of Fielda, Fieldb, Fieldc ... ?

Hi,

As mentioned before, I am migrating a MySQL application to PostgreSQL but I
have little experience with PG.

One function that I found extremely useful in MySQL was the FIELDS()
function. I don't think that there is a built-in function in PostgreSQL that
achieves the same effect, but basically the first argument was the string
you were searching for and the rest were strings to inspect. If the string
was not found, it returned zero - otherwise it returned the zero-based index
of the argument which matched (if that makes sense). I then used the SIGN()
function to simply determine whether the string had been found or not - 1
indicated it had, 0 that it had not.

Has anyone written such a function, preferably one that goes a little
further than the MySQL one, allowing you to specify wildcards in the search
string? If so, I would be very interested in using it. Otherwise, pointers
towards a "beginners" reference for creating PostgreSQL functions would be
much appreciated..

Many thanks,

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Alexi Margo
Internet Systems Manager
Wildwood Technology Ltd
http://www.wwood.co.uk/
t +44-(0)20 8426 7777
f +44-(0)20 8426 5050
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