Question

I am trying to execute this, but its throwing the error. Can anyone please help?

 SELECT * FROM `country` WHERE name regex '^ab$';

1064 – You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘regex ‘^ab$’ LIMIT 0, 30′ at line 1

• My motto is to get “united states of america” record while user
  searches for any phrase like

  united states of/united states/states united/america united/america states

Can anyone please tell me how I can write a regular expression for this requirement.

 SELECT * FROM `country` WHERE name regex '^united states$';

But Like is working fine with

SELECT * FROM `country` WHERE name like '%ab%';

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

In addition to what sp00m has noted, fairly sure your regex isn’t what you are looking for. ^ and $ match the beginning and end of line, respectively, so using these regexes:

^ab$
^united states$

is effectively looking for an exact match on “ab” and “united states”. If you are looking for a query equivalent to like '%ab%', remove the beginning and end of line characters, your regex simply being:

ab

I do wonder what was wrong with using a LIKE '%ab%' though. Seems like the more typical method.

Neither option, however, will make the regex united states or ^united states$ or using a like similarly match “america united” though