Question

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MySQL – How to search for exact word match using LIKE?

For example, if Im trying to get rows with the word “ever”, I could do this…

SELECT * FROM 'table' WHERE `title` LIKE %ever%

But that would also give me results for titles with the words “forever, however, never”.

How can I find only the titles which contain “ever” as its own word?

Answer 1

Use a REGEXP regular expression to match using word boundaries [[:<:]]word[[:>:]] around your search term:

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `title` REGEXP '[[:<:]]ever[[:>:]]'

Note that this is case-insensitive by default. For case sensitivity, you need to match it in BINARY mode:

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `title` REGEXP BINARY '[[:<:]]ever[[:>:]]'

Since it cannot make use of indexing, performance can be quite poor on large tables however.

Edit: Sorry I had PCRE boundaries in there, which MySQL doesn’t support.