Question

Trying to use this sql statement. The first 2 parts work fine, I am trying in corporate charlist so that the string its pulling cannot contain any of the letters in it

SELECT * FROM table WHERE LENGTH(RTRIM(word)) = 8 AND word LIKE 'a__c____' AND word LIKE '%[!tesp]%' GROUP BY word

Basically I want this statement to pull up a word that is:

• 8 letters in length
• starts with “a” and 4th letter is “c”
• does not contain “t” “e” “s” “p” in it

Answer 1

Use the REGEXP (or its synonym RLIKE) operator for this.

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE word RLIKE '^a[^tesp]{2}c[^tesp]{4} *$'
GROUP BY word;

The [^tesp]{2} means “match 2 characters that are not t, e, s or p”.

Note that the 8-letters is enforced by the regex. Also, it handles the RTRIM by the *$ at the end of the regex (allowing any number of spaces at the end).

This lets you just do one pass over each word instead of three (once for LENGTH, once for LIKE 'a__c____' and once for the “t”,”e”,”s”,”p”).