# Find Multiple Conditions

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/find-multiple-conditions/108883>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 8, 2007, 10:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/find-multiple-conditions/108883 "2007-07-08T22:13:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cfingerh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@cfingerh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cfingerh)\
**Post date:** [July 8, 2007, 10:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/find-multiple-conditions/108883/1 "2007-07-08T22:13:59Z")

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Hi,

I’m getting my records using:

@users= User.find(:all,:conditions=\>["country=? ",country])

where country is a String with the name of the country.

But now I want to get the result for different countries.  
I have an array  
countries = [‘Germany’,‘France’,‘Spain’]

and I want to get all the records where country is one of those  
included in the array

How can I do that?

Thanks

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cfingerh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@cfingerh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cfingerh)\
**Post date:** [July 8, 2007, 10:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/find-multiple-conditions/108883/2 "2007-07-08T22:30:00Z")

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cfingerh wrote:

> But now I want to get the result for different countries.  
> I have an array  
> countries = [‘Germany’,‘France’,‘Spain’]
> 
> and I want to get all the records where country is one of those  
> included in the array

The following suggestion is a detestable hack, but it works. The names  
of  
countries (someone correct my logic here) don’t contain single or double  
quotes, right? That means my hack will work, regardless how a database  
escapes quotes within strings:

:conditions=\> "country in (#{ countries.map(&:inspect).join(‘,’) }) "

The &:inspect is a trick to put quotes around each country’s name.

And no post advising SQL abuse would be complete without warning against  
SQL-insertion attacks. .inspect makes those impossible too, but at the  
cost  
of very probably crashing your query.

Remember that ActiveRecord does Ruby things better than SQL things at  
times,  
meaning to get the most out of your queries you ought to learn more SQL  
SELECT statements. And there might also be a better Rails way to do what  
I  
did.

–  
Phlip  
[Test Driven Ajax (on Rails) [Book]](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/)  
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”  
assert\_xpath, assert\_javascript, & assert\_ajax

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cfingerh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@cfingerh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cfingerh)\
**Post date:** [July 9, 2007, 12:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/find-multiple-conditions/108883/3 "2007-07-09T00:39:12Z")

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ActiveRecord deals with this perfectly nicely,  
as part of its “sanitize\_sql\_array” method.

countries = [“Germany”, “France”, “Spain”]

User.find(:all, :conditions =\> [“country IN (?)”, countries])

the countries will be escaped correctly and seperated with commas.  
This will fail if countries turns out to be empty,

so you’ll need to handle that case seperately.

fingerh wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I’m getting my records using:
> 
> @users= User.find(:all,:conditions=\>["country=? ",country])
> 
> where country is a String with the name of the country.
> 
> But now I want to get the result for different countries.  
> I have an array  
> countries = [‘Germany’,‘France’,‘Spain’]
> 
> and I want to get all the records where country is one of those  
> included in the array
> 
> How can I do that?
> 
> Thanks