I have a MySQL statement with a LIKE. However, the column sometimes contains:

  

which then does not match. An example:

ad_detail LIKE 'Personal Growth - 1'

Column ad_detail contains:

Personal Growth - 1 //matches
Personal Growth - 1 //does not match
Personal Growth - 1 //does not match
Personal Growth - 1 //does not match

How can I fix this to match in all instances please.

CodePudding user response：

LIKE in MySQL has only two wildcards, one which matches any single character and one which matches any string of zero or more characters. These wildcards are _ and % respectively.

You could do this:

ad_detail LIKE 'Personal Growth%- 1'

But this would have the unintended behavior of matching a lot of other strings that you don't want it to.

Personal Growth - 1 //matches
Personal Growth - 1 //matches
Personal Growth - 1 //matches
Personal Growth - 1 //matches

Probably matches things you don't to match:

Personal Growth-1 //matches because % matches zero characters
Personal Growth is good for you -1 //matches because % matches any string of characters

You probably want to use a regular expression:

ad_detail REGEXP 'Personal Growth( | )-( | )1'

CodePudding user response：

I found this:

REPLACE(at_award_description.ad_detail, ' ', ' ') LIKE ?

Where ? is any string that I am matching against (e.g., 'Personal Growth - 1').