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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T09:48:36+00:00

Here is my query, which tries to put a full stop at the end

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Here is my query, which tries to put a full stop at the end of every sentence that doesn’t end in proper punctuation

UPDATE SentenceTable SET sentence=concat(sentence, '.') WHERE sentence NOT LIKE '%.' OR sentence NOT LIKE '%?' OR sentence NOT LIKE '%!';

However, this ends up putting a full stop at the end of every single sentence. I’m afraid I have a problem with the regular expressions from above, maybe I am not escaping some special characters correctly? What am I doing wrong? How should this query read?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re using OR between each of your sentence NOT LIKE .. clauses; using AND should fix this:

    UPDATE
    SentenceTable
SET
    sentence=concat(sentence, '.')
WHERE
    sentence NOT LIKE '%.'
    AND sentence NOT LIKE '%?'
    AND sentence NOT LIKE '%!';

    The reasoning for this is because, assume the sentence ends with !, such as “This is a sentence!”. Your very first clause is sentence NOT LIKE '%.'. Well, this sentence doesn’t end with a ., and because you’re only using OR the WHERE-clause stops parsing the rest of the clauses. When you switch to AND, it evaluates all of the conditions and since the last one fails, the sentence won’t get updated!

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