Is there any way to combine IN with LIKE in an SQL statement?

Question

I am trying to find a way, if possible, to use IN and LIKE together. What I want to accomplish is putting a subquery that pulls up a list of data into an IN statement. The problem is the list of data contains wildcards. Is there any way to do this?

Just something I was curious on.

Example of data in the 2 tables

Parent table

ID    Office_Code   Employee_Name
1     GG234         Tom
2     GG654         Bill
3     PQ123         Chris

Second table

ID    Code_Wildcard
1     GG%
2     PQ%

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Clarifying note (via third-party)

Since I'm seeing several responses which don't seems to address what Ziltoid asks, I thought I try clarifying what I think he means.

In SQL, "WHERE col IN (1,2,3)" is roughly the equivalent of "WHERE col = 1 OR col = 2 OR col = 3".

He's looking for something which I'll pseudo-code as

 WHERE col IN_LIKE ('A%', 'TH%E', '%C')

which would be roughly the equivalent of

 WHERE col LIKE 'A%' OR col LIKE 'TH%E' OR col LIKE '%C'

The Regex answers seem to come closest; the rest seem way off the mark.

Answer 1

I'm not sure which database you're using, but with Oracle you could accomplish something equivalent by aliasing your subquery in the FROM clause rather than using it in an IN clause. Using your example:

select p.*
from
  (select code_wildcard
   from second
   where id = 1) s
  join parent p
      on p.office_code like s.code_wildcard

Answer 2

In MySQL, use REGEXP:

WHERE field1 REGEXP('(value1)|(value2)|(value3)')

Same in Oracle:

WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(field1, '(value1)|(value2)|(value3)')