Question

I’m trying to find words of three letters from a given set using the next syntax:

SELECT * FROM words WHERE word REGEXP '^[dcqaahii]{3}'

and it returns words with more than three letters. I thought that {3} limit the length of the output.

Any one know what’s wrong in my expression?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

REGEXP, unlike LIKE, does not have to match the whole string. It only needs to match a portion of the string.

If you want columns that match your regex exactly, you need to include both the BOL and EOL characters in your regex:

'^[dcqaahii]{3}$'

regular-expressions.info has more details.