I was recently venturing into the world of SharePoint Development using REST. I wanted to do a query for list items containing a particular string, rather than just equals a string.

I had some trouble coming up with the solution at the time (this was about 7 months ago) and just never got around to writing up a blog post. So, those of you that may be having the same trouble coming up with the solution, here it is.

http://[web application url]/_vti_bin/ListData.svc/[List Name]?$filter=substringof(‘[String]‘,[List Column])

For those of you that like a specific example with all the values filled in.

Here is my Original List:

The REST query without any filter applied:

The REST query with a filter applied: