Searching for Wildcard Characters in SQL

Been a while - a quick flush...you may have a need to search for the wildcard characters "_" and "%". When that happens you need to know how to escape them. This has slightly different behavior for different database products. MySQL and SQL Server do work the same way, however, if you stick to using the ESCAPE clause.

	-- mysql has an default escape character \
	SELECT * FROM people WHERE symbol LIKE 'hello\_world';
	-- or you can specify the escape character
	SELECT * FROM people WHERE symbol LIKE 'hello|_world' ESCAPE '|';
	-- tsql has no default but you can go with a single character class
	SELECT * FROM people WHERE symbol LIKE 'hello[_]world';
	-- or you can specify an escape character
	SELECT * FROM people WHERE symbol LIKE 'hello|_world' ESCAPE '|';

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