Substring lookup for array elements

Hello,
Is substring look up possible for array of strings?

Query.contains('product_names', [chair]),

this only works if I have the exact item name. cha instead of chair does not work.

product_names is a an array: ['chair', 'door', 'table']

try .contains()

product_name.contains('chair')

I would cast your query results to a var with a type and then use your languages type functions to parse the list, not try to handle that with the Appwrite sdk

my issue is, product_name.contains('chair') works, but product_name.contains('cha') does not fetch the rows that have chair as one of the array elements.

it would also help to know what language you're using

this js. for web

Then I think we're confusing 2 things here, searching a list, and using the SDK to search for rows whose product contains characters. You might try Query.contains['product_name', searchTermVariable] and have that run onKeyUp https://appwrite.io/blog/post/introducing-new-database-operators but this will result in hecking calls to your DB

If that doesn't work it's possible AppWrite doesn't support partial searches / substring searches in the DB

but I'm not an expert I've been using appwrite for like a week

.contains() does substring look up but when it is just a string, and not an array. so you are not wrong thinking about .contains().