Question

Suppose I have a purely alphanumeric string (“abc123”), and I want to see if it’s in a database column, with one caveat– I want all nonalphanumeric characters to be ignored in the comparison. So “abc~!@#$%^&*()123” would match, for example.

Is there a simple way to do this in MySQL, preferably without defining any functions? I was thinking it might be possible with REGEXP comparison.

Answer 1

Figured it out with this regular expression..

$regexp = implode('[^0-9a-zA-Z]*', str_split(remove_nonalphanums($word)));

Then I do The_Column REGEXP $regexp