Question

A table contains the string "Hello world!"

Thinking of * as the ordinary wildcard character, how can I write a REGEXP that will evalute to true for 'W*rld!' but false for 'H*rld!' since H is part of another word. 'W*rld' should evalute to false as well because of the trailing '!'

Answer 1

You can use regular expressions in MySQL:

SELECT 'Hello world!' REGEXP 'H[[:alnum:]]+rld!'
0
SELECT 'Hello world!' REGEXP 'w[[:alnum:]]+rld!'
1

More information about the syntax can be found here.