Question

How to search a word in exact match, for example how to search word ‘leak‘, but search results should not include words like ‘leaked‘ or ‘leaks‘ etc.

Help in both Javascript and MySQL would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Basically, you need to look for word boundaries. So don’t think of looking for the word leak, but looking for the word $leak#, where $ is an imaginary character that is at the beginning of every word and # is an imaginary character at the end of every word (Not a standard convention, just assume it for this example). The words are delimited, by, lets say whitespaces for now. So, leaked and leaks is $leaked# and $leaks#. As such, the only part that matches is $leak and not $leak#.

To do that in MySQL, the condition would be:

REGEXP '[[:<:]]leak[[:>:]]';

Here, [[:<:]] is the begin-word word-boundary and [[:>:]] is the end-word word-boundary.

For JavaScript, the query would be:

/\bleak\b/

Here, the sequence \b represents a word-boundary (in javascript, there is no distinction between begin-word and end-word boundaries). It won’t only work for whitespaces, but even punctuation characters, for example:

.leak
,leak
;leak

will match /\bleak\b/, but aleak will not. (I am unsure about MySQL though)