Question

MySQL has decided not to play ball with a certain regular expression I put together. The grand plan is for it to match a string which might or might not be terminated by a punctuation mark.

I have entered the following into 2 apps designed to validate regular expressions, and in both cases the expression works flawlessly:

\bString\b[[:punct:]]?

But the moment this is introduced to MySQL as

[[:<:]]String[[:>:]][[:punct:]]? 

Then it doesn’t work at all. It will accept String but not String! or String;

I am at wit’s end, so if anyone could shed some light on this, I would be deeply grateful!

TIA 🙂

Answer 1

[[:>:]] means end of word. Usually a space.

String (note the spaces) matches.
String! does not match.

Change the regex into:

[[:<:]]String[[:>:]]{0,1}[[:punct:]]{0,1}