How to use SQL 'LIKE' with LINQ to Entities? [duplicate]

Answer 1

How to get it to work seamlessly:

in your EDMX model, add:

    
      
      
      
        searchingIn LIKE lookingFor
      
    

just after the sections that start:

Then, anywhere in your code, add this extension method:

    //prior to EF 6 [System.Data.Objects.DataClasses.EdmFunction("Your.Namespace", "String_Like")]

    //With EF 6
    [System.Data.Entity.DbFunction("Your.Namespace", "String_Like")]
    public static bool Like(this string input, string pattern)
    {
        /* Turn "off" all regular expression related syntax in
         * the pattern string. */
        pattern = Regex.Escape(pattern);

        /* Replace the SQL LIKE wildcard metacharacters with the
         * equivalent regular expression metacharacters. */
        pattern = pattern.Replace("%", ".*?").Replace("_", ".");

        /* The previous call to Regex.Escape actually turned off
         * too many metacharacters, i.e. those which are recognized by
         * both the regular expression engine and the SQL LIKE
         * statement ([...] and [^...]). Those metacharacters have
         * to be manually unescaped here. */
        pattern = pattern.Replace(@"\[", "[").Replace(@"\]", "]").Replace(@"\^", "^");

        return Regex.IsMatch(input, pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
    }

And there you have it.

Now you can do:

(from e in Entities
 where e.Name like '%dfghj%'
 select e)

or

string [] test = {"Sydney", "Melbourne", "adelaide", "ryde"};

test.Where(t=> t.Like("%yd%e%")).Dump();