Selecting Records in SQL using LIKE function to very specific avail

user_19428157 0
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I haven't been able to find a question that addressed an instance as specific as this, but apologies if I've missed something.

If I want to select records that contain a specific word 'Apple', but I want to ensure records that might contain the word 'PineApple' are omitted, would the LIKE operator allow for this in this instance, or would there need to be further conditioning:

e.g

SELECT ID, Manufacturer FROM Table1 WHERE Manufacturer LIKE '%apple%'

Many thanks.

conditional-statements sql
2 Answers

To do this using only LIKE and without regular expressions, you may try:

SELECT ID, Manufacturer
FROM Table1
WHERE Manufacturer LIKE 'apple %' OR    -- at the start of the name
      Manufacturer LIKE '% apple %' OR  -- in the middle
      Manufacturer LIKE '% apple';      -- at the end

Assuming your version of SQL does support some kind of regex like, you could match on the pattern \bapple\b, which means match apple as a standalone word.

user_18632290

If you add a space before and after the value, then you can search by LIKE '% apple %'

SELECT ID, Manufacturer 
FROM Table1 
WHERE LOWER(CONCAT(' ', Manufacturer, ' ')) LIKE '% apple %';
user_4365600
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