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Asked: 2026-05-26T00:55:07+00:00

I am trying to retrieve the contact names based on the keyed search string.

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I am trying to retrieve the contact names based on the keyed search string. It performs good for the English alphabets and behaves strangely for special chars such as _,/,\,%

My query in the function is similar to 

SELECT contact_name FROM contacts WHERE LOWER(contact_name) LIKE LOWER('_McDonald%') ORDER BY LOWER(contact_name) ASC LIMIT 1;

It looks like, during searching, it retrieves all the contact names instead of the desired. The similar bizarre happens for the above mentioned special chars. I need to support these. How do I educate postgres to consider these chars? Please guide me.

Thanks and Regards,
Siva.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Just to complete the picture:

    You can also use the ESCAPE clause to specify the character for escaping the wildcards. This is useful if you’d like to include e.g. a \ in your search string.

    SELECT contact_name 
FROM contacts 
WHERE LOWER(contact_name) LIKE LOWER('@_McDonald%') ESCAPE '@'
ORDER BY LOWER(contact_name) ASC 
LIMIT 1;

    Btw: I would recommend to turn on the configuration option standard_conforming_strings to avoid confusion (Haes’ answer avoids this problem by using the E' syntax).
    Since 9.1 this is the default mode anyway.

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