Regular Expression Error in MySQL Query - mysql

I'm trying to search through a database of sofware titles for those that have an interior capital letter (e.g PowerPoiint, inCase).
I tried
select * from table where field REGEXP '^([a-z][A-Z]+)+$'
This seemed to work as it returned a subset of the table and most were correct but a fair amount were not (e.g Alias). Clearly it is doing something right but not sure what; could it be that the ascii is somehow messed up?

Try this as your RegEx pattern:
^[A-z]+[A-Z][A-z]+$
It will match all the examples above (PowerPoint, inCase), and not match 'Alias', one of the examples that you are having trouble with.

Related

mysql MATCH AGAINST weird characters query

I have a table where the field "company_name" has weird characters, like "à","ö","¬","©","¬","†", etc. I want to return all "company_name"s that contain these characters anywhere within the string. My current query looks like this:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE
MATCH (company_name) AGAINST ('"Ä","à","ö","¬","©","¬","†"' in natural language mode);
But I keep getting no data from the query. I know this can't be the case, as there are definitely examples of them I can find manually. To be clear, the query itself isn't throwing any errors, just not returning any data.
The minimun word length is 3 pr 4 .
you can change it see manial
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html
or use regular expressiions
SELECT * FROM table WHERE
ompany_name REGEXP '[Äàö¬©¬†]+';
SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE company_name LIKE '%[^0-9a-zA-Z !"#$%&''()*+,\-./:;<=>?#\[\^_`{|}~\]\\]%' ESCAPE '\'
This will find any wacky stuff, including wide characters or 'euro-ASCII' or emoji.

Why isn't MySQL REGEXP filtering out these values?

So I'm trying to find what "special characters" have been used in my customer names. I'm going through updating this query to find them all one-by-one, but it's still showing all customers with a - despite me trying to exlude that in the query.
Here's the query I'm using:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name REGEXP "[^\da-zA-Z\ \.\&\-\(\)\,]+";
This customer (and many others with a dash) are still showing in the query results:
Test-able Software Ltd
What am I missing? Based on that regexp, shouldn't that one be excluded from the query results?
Testing it on https://regex101.com/r/AMOwaj/1 shows there is no match.
Edit - So I want to FIND any which have characters other than the ones in the regex character set. Not exclude any which do have these characters.
Your code checks if the string contains any character that does not belong to the character class, while you want to ensure that none does belong to it.
You can use ^ and $ to check the while string at once:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name REGEXP '^[^\da-zA-Z .&\-(),]+$';
This would probably be simpler expressed with NOT, and without negating the character class:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name NOT REGEXP '[\da-zA-Z .&\-(),]';
Note that you don't need to escape all the characters within the character class, except probably for -.
Use [0-9] or [[:digit:]] to match digits irrespective of MySQL version.
Use the hyphen where it can't make part of a range construction.
Fix the expression as
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name REGEXP "[^0-9a-zA-Z .&(),-]+";
If the entire text should match this pattern, enclose with ^ / $:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name REGEXP "^[^0-9a-zA-Z .&(),-]+$";
- implies a range except if it is first. (Well, after the "not" (^).)
So use
"[^-0-9a-zA-Z .&(),]"
I removed the + at the end because you don't really care how many; this way it will stop after finding one.

MYSQL Find entries that contain more than 7 numbers

I need to find entries that contain more than 7 numbers in one of my mysql tables BUT the numbers are separated by letters or anything else.
What I have is this little piece of code I use to find entries like dsc123456789:
select * from crawl where title regexp '[0-9]{7}'
How can I find entries like dsc-123-456_78B9? I tried different things but without success so far.
Thanks
You can use the following solution:
SELECT *
FROM crawl
WHERE title REGEXP '(([^[:digit:]])?[[:digit:]]){8,}';
Why the original query of the answer doesn't work?
-- this query doesn't work!
SELECT *
FROM crawl
WHERE title REGEXP '\d([^\d]?\d){7,}'
MySQL can't use character groups like \d (digits). So the query fails every time. On PHP and other languages the regular expression would look like this:
\d([^\d]?\d){7,}
but on MySQL this isn't valid. So you have to use the character classes of MySQL to solve this:
(([^[:digit:]])?[[:digit:]]){8,}
Hint: Make sure you use {8} or {8,} instead of {7} since you want to find all entries with more than 7 numbers / digits.

Isolate an email address from a string using MySQL

I am trying to isolate an email address from a block of free field text (column name is TEXT).
There are many different variations of preceding and succeeding characters in the free text field, i.e.:
email me! john#smith.com
e:john#smith.com m:555-555-5555
john#smith.com--personal email
I've tried variations of INSTR() and SUBSTRING_INDEX() to first isolate the "#" (probably the one reliable constant in finding an email...) and extracting the characters to the left (up until a space or non-qualifying character like "-" or ":") and doing the same thing with the text following the #.
However - everything I've tried so far hasn't filtered out the noise to the level I need.
Obviously 100% accuracy isn't possible but would someone mind taking a crack at how I can structure my select statement?
There is no easy solution to do this within MySQL. However you can do this easily after you have retrieved it using regular expressions.
Here would be a an example of how to use it in your case: Regex example
If you want it to select all e-mail addresses from one string: Regex Example
You can use regex to extract the ones where it does contain an e-mail in MySQL but it still doesn't extract the group from the string. This has to be done outside MySQL
SELECT * FROM table
WHERE column RLIKE '\w*#\w*.\w*'
RLIKE is only for matching it, you can use REGEXP in the SELECT but it only returns 1 or 0 on whether it has found a match or not :s
If you do want to extract it in MySQL maybe this other stackoverflow post helps you out. But it seems like a lot of work instead of doing it outside MySQL
Now in MySQL 5 and 8 you can use REGEXP_SUBSTR to isolate just the email from a block of free text.
SELECT *, REGEXP_SUBSTR(`TEXT`, '([a-zA-Z0-9._%+\-]+)#([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+)\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})') AS Emails FROM `mytable`;
If you want to get just the records with emails and remove duplicates ...
SELECT DISTINCT REGEXP_SUBSTR(`TEXT`, '([a-zA-Z0-9._%+\-]+)#([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+)\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})') AS Emails FROM `mytable` WHERE `TEXT` REGEXP '([a-zA-Z0-9._%+\-]+)#([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+)\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})';

Performance of LIKE 'xyz%' v/s LIKE '%xyz'

I was wondering how the LIKE operator actually work.
Does it simply start from first character of the string and try matching pattern, one character moving to the right? Or does it look at the placement of the %, i.e. if it finds the % to be the first character of the pattern, does it start from the right most character and starts matching, moving one character to the left on each successful match?
Not that I have any use case in my mind right now, just curious.
edit: made question narrow
If there is an index on the column, putting constant characters in the front will lead your dbms to use a more efficient searching/seeking algorithm. But even at the simplest form, the dbms has to test characters. If it is able to find it doesn't match early on, it can discard it and move onto the next test.
The LIKE search condition uses wildcards to search for patterns within a string. For example:
WHERE name LIKE 'Mickey%'
will locate all values that begin with 'Mickey' optionally followed by any number of characters. The % is not case sensitive and not accent sensitive and you can use multiple %, for example
WHERE name LIKE '%mouse%'
will return all values with 'mouse' (or 'Mouse' or 'mousé') in it.
The % is inclusive, meaning that
WHERE name like '%A%'
will return all that starts with an 'A', contain 'A' or end with 'A'.
You can use _ (underscore) for any character on a single position:
WHERE name LIKE '_at%'
will give you all values with 'a' as the second letter and 't' as the third. The first letter can be anything. For example: 'Batman'
In T-SQL, if you use [] you can find values in a range.
WHERE name LIKE '[c-f]%'
it will find any value beginning with letter between c and f, inclusive. Meaning it will return any value that start with c, d, e or f. This [] is T-SQL only. Use [^ ] to find values not in a range.
Finding all values that contain a number:
WHERE name LIKE '%[0-9]%'
returns everything that has a number in it. Example: 'Godfather2'
If you are looking for all values with the 3rd position to be a '-' (dash) use two underscores:
WHERE NAME '__-%'
It will return for example: 'Lo-Res'
Finding the values with names ends in 'xyz' use:
WHERE name LIKE '%xyz'
returns anything that ends with 'xyz'
Finding a % sign in a name use brackets:
WHERE name LIKE '%[%]%'
will return for example: 'Top%Movies'
Searching for [ use brackets around it:
WHERE name LIKE '%[[]%'
gives results as: 'New York [NY]'
The database collation's sort order determines both case sensitivety and the sort order for the range of characters. You can optionally use COLLATE to specify collation sort order used by the LIKE operator.
Usually the main performance bottleneck is IO. The efficiency of the LIKE operator can be only important if your whole table fits in the memory otherwise IO will take most of the time.
AFAIK oracle can use indexes for prefix matching. (like 'abc%'), but these index cannot be used for more complex expressions.
Anyway if you have only this kind of queries you should consider using a simple index on the related column. (Probably this is true for other RDBMS's as well.)
Otherwise LIKE operator is generally slow, but most of the RDBMS have some kind of full text searching solution. I think the main reason of the slowness is that LIKE is too general. Usually full text indexes has lots of different options which can tell the database what you really want to search for, and with these additional information the DB can do its task in a more efficient way.
As a rule of thumb I think if you want to search in a text field and you think performance can be an issue, you should consider your RDBMS's full text searching solution, or the real goal is not text searching, but this is some kind of "design side effect", for example xml/json/statuses stored in a field as text, then probably you should consider choosing a more efficient data storing option. (if there is any...)