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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T02:27:25+00:00

I am trying to set up a search feature on my site that will

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I am trying to set up a search feature on my site that will only return exact matches to keyword entered by the user. So if the user searches “dog” I don’t want an article titled “Doggy Style” to appear in the search results (just an example I don’t really have an article by that name). This of course does exactly that:

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE article_title LIKE '%$searchQuery%'

$searchQuery here is a PHP variable taken from the user’s input form. So is there any way to return only exact matches?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    SELECT * FROM articles WHERE article_title = '$searchQuery'

    would return an exact match. Notice the change from ‘like’ to ‘=’ and notice the % signs have been removed.

    Also be sure never to use direct input from a user form as input to search your MySQL database as it is not safe.

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