Beginners guide to MySQL and MariaDB

In MySQL LIKE condition allows wildcards to be used in WHERE clause of INSERT,SELECT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement. It allows to perform pattern matching.

Syntax :

expression LIKE pattern [ ESCAPE 'escape_character' ]

expression is character expression such as a column or field.

pattern is a character expression which contains pattern matching.

Here is an example

From our PHP Script here is an example of using the LIKE clause

If we have to rewrite our SELECT query to only show Books from book_tbl WHERE author is C. Here is how we do it from a PHP script with PDO extension

<?php
$server = "localhost";
$user = "username";
$pwd = "password";

try {
      $connection = new PDO("mysql:host=$server;dbname=testDB", $user, $pwd);
      $connection->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
      $sql = "select * from book_tbl where book_title LIKE 'Le%';";
      // above will only select books for author C    
      $select = $sql->prepare($sql);
      $select->execute();         
      $result = $select->fetchAll();
      var_dump($result);
    }
    catch(PDOException $e)
    {
    echo "Connection failed: " . $e->getMessage();
    } 

?>

In the next part we will see how to sort data on retreival.