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Asked: 2026-05-21T09:49:42+00:00

What I’m trying to do is to write a query like the following: Foo.where(bar

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What I’m trying to do is to write a query like the following:

Foo.where("bar LIKE 'bam\_%'")

The idea being that this would return all the rows where bar, which contains a string, starts with ‘bam_’ and then is of an indeterminate length thereafter. I’ve tried this as a pure MySQL query in the MySQL workbench and it seems to work as expected. When I do this in RoR, however, it seems to ignore the escape character completely and treats underscore like the wildcard that it really is. Is there not a way to write this in Rails where I can include the underscore in my query? Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The backslash is an escape character in Ruby strings, so \_ means to treat the _ as literal. Since _ is treated as literal anyway, this does nothing, except to treat the \ as if it wasn’t there. One of the ways to actually have a backslash in your string given by a Ruby literal is to escape it by using another backslash (e.g. "bar LIKE 'bam\\_%'").

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