Question

I need to select columns that end in an uppercase extension.

for example, look at the following table.

id - picture
1 - abc.JPG
2 - def.jpg
3 - 123.jpg
4 - xyz.JPG

the results should give me the rows 1 and 4 because JPG are in uppercase.

can anyone help?

Answer 1

I’m far from an expert, but case sensitivity has hung me up before. Are you able to modify the structure of your table? One thing that may help is changing the collation of the table as follows (SQLFiddle here):

CREATE TABLE pics (id INT, picture VARCHAR(200))
CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_general_cs;
INSERT INTO pics VALUES 
(1, 'abc.JPG'),
(2, 'def.jpg'),
(3, '123.jpg'),
(4, 'xyz.JPG')

The _cs stands for case sensitive, and I believe the default is case insensitive, which makes case-based comparisons a bit trickier. You can then use the following query to get your rows:

SELECT *
FROM pics
WHERE picture REGEXP '\.[[:upper:]+]$'

If you do not have access to your underlying table, you could try the following, which casts the column in a different character set (latin1), and then changes the collation to support case-insensitive comparisons (SQLFiddle here):

SELECT *
FROM pics
WHERE CAST(picture AS CHAR CHARACTER SET latin1) 
      COLLATE latin1_general_cs REGEXP '\.[[:upper:]+]$'