Matching a string against a column full of regular expressions

Question

I have a column in a table that is full of regular expressions.

I have a string in my code, and I want to find out which regular expressions in that column would match that string and return those rows.

Aside from pulling each row and matching the regular expression (which is costly, checking against potentially thousands of records for a single page load) is there a way I can do this in SQL instead with one (or a couple) queries?

Example input: W12ABC

Example column data

1   ^[W11][\w]+$  
2   ^[W12][\w]+$  
3   ^[W13][\w]+$ 
4   ^[W1][\w]+[A][\w]+$  
5   ^[W1][\w]+[B][\w]+$  
6   ^[W1][\w]+[C][\w]+$  

Should return rows 2 and 4.

Answer 1

If you're open to wildcards you can store patterns that work for LIKE syntax: "W12%" or "W%ABC". Your query would look like this:

SELECT * FROM Table Where 'W12ABC' LIKE Column