Query for exact match of a string in SQL

Question

I want to query for the exact match of a string from a database table.

When I write the query as

select description from tproduct where description          


        

Answer 1

If I understand the question correctly you want to match "diamond" when it's a distinct word and not part of another word like "diamondville." You could do something like SELECT * FROM tproduct WHERE description like '% diamond %' and this would match all of the records which have "diamond" surrounded by spaces.

But that wouldn't work. That wouldn't find records where the description starts with "Diamond" or where there's a comma or period after "Diamond"

You need to match on a regular expression. You can specify word boundaries with that:

select * from t2 where description regexp '[[:<:]]diamond[[:>:]]';

See this page for more info on MySQL regular expressions: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/regexp.html