[SQL] using pg_tables and tablename in queries

[solarsail]

I have a large number of tables with a common naming convention

      mytable001, mytable002, mytable003 ... mytable00n

I would like to do a query across all of the tables, however I do not know all of the tables before hand, and I do not want to ( cant ) manually generate a query like

     select * from mytable001, mytable002, mytable003


I have a query that returns the names of the tables I want to query:

   select tablename from pg_tables where tablename like 'mytable%'


I have successfully done this query before.  I remember it used a odd syntax; I it was something like

    select * from ( select tablename from pg_tables where tablename like 'mytable%' )


However the above query returns just a listing of tables, I need to use its output in the FROM and treat the input as a table name.

( I've tried creating a Table Function that returns the above set and tried to use that in a select clause, but I cant get it to work. )