Question

I’m looking to find records in a table that match a specific number that the user enters. So, the user may enter 12345, but this could be 123zz4-5 in the database.

I imagine something like this would work, if PHP functions worked in MySQL.

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE preg_replace("/[^0-9]/","",bar) = '12345' 

What’s the equivalent function or way to do this with just MySQL?

Speed is not important.

Answer 1

While it’s not pretty and it shows results that don’t match, this helps:

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar LIKE = '%1%2%3%4%5%' 

I would still like to find a better solution similar to the item in the original question.