Question

I have following table structure in my DB

ID               Name
--------------------------
ID_1             Name1

ID1              Name2

when I execute the following query

SELECT * FROM tblNames
WHERE ID LIKE '_1'

I get both records selected…

any suggestions how to get rid off it??

Answer 1

An underscore (_) is a special character in LIKE expressions that matches a single character.

To match an actual underscore, you need to escape it:

select * from tblNames where id like '%\_1' escape '\'

Here I’m telling SQL Server to consider backslash an escape character, and using it to escape the underscore.

Alternatively, you can represent the underscore as a character range with a single character in it – it will be interpreted literally in this case:

select * from tblNames where id like '%[_]1'

Which is a bit more succinct.

Reference: MSDN.