LIKE

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.

Syntax

<expression> LIKE '<pattern>'

Parameters

Parameter	Description	Supported 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.

Return Type

BOOLEAN

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|
+----------+----------+-------------------------+