The LIKE is used for pattern matching to find similar strings in data. It’s often employed in the WHERE clause to filter results based on specific patterns. LIKE is case-sensitive; use ILIKE for case-insensitive pattern matching.

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Syntax

<expression> LIKE '<pattern>'

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Parameters

ParameterDescriptionSupported input types
<expression>Any expression that evaluates to TEXT.TEXT
<pattern>Specifies the pattern to match (case-sensitive).TEXT constant. SQL wildcards are supported:

* Use an underscore (_) to match any single character
* Use a percent sign (%) to match any number of any characters, including no characters.

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Return Type

BOOLEAN

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Example

Find nicknames from the players table that partially match the string “joe” and any following characters as follows:

SELECT
	playerid, nickname, email
FROM
	players
WHERE
	nickname LIKE 'joe%';

Returns:

+----------+----------+-------------------------+
| playerid | nickname | email                   |
+----------+----------+-------------------------+
| 160      | joedavis | cgarcia@example.org     |
| 519 	   | joe79    | jennifer10@example.net  |
| 3692 	   | joeli    | cperez@example.net      |
| 3891	   | joel11   | joanncain@example.net   |
| 4233 	   | joellong | millerholly@example.net |
| 4627 	   | joebowen | amandalewis@example.net |
+----------+----------+-------------------------+

Note that the following would return no results, as LIKE matches case-sensitively, unlike ILIKE:

SELECT
	playerid, nickname, email
FROM
	players
WHERE
	nickname LIKE 'Joe%';

Find nicknames from the players table that have a specific pattern:

SELECT
	playerid, nickname, email
FROM
	players
WHERE
	nickname LIKE '%oe_e%';

The pattern %oe_e% signifies any string that contains “oe” followed by any character (_ acts as a wildcard for a single character) and then “e”.

Returns

+----------+----------+-------------------------+
| playerid | nickname | email                   |
+----------+----------+-------------------------+
| 3891     | joel11    | joanncain@example.net  |
| 4233     | joellong  | millerholly@example.net|
+----------+----------+-------------------------+