I am a beginner so please help me.
There are 2 things you need to combine in this case.
Because you didn't provide enough information in your question we have to guess what you mean by name. I'm going to assume that you have a single name column, but that would be unusual.
With strings, to match a character column that is not an exact match, you need to use LIKE which allows for wildcards.
You also need to negate the match, or in other words show things that are NOT (something).
First to match names that START with 'A'.
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE name LIKE 'A%';
This should get you all the PEOPLE who have names that "Start with A".
Some databases are case sensitive. I'm not going to deal with that issue. If you were using MySQL that is not an issue. Case sensitivity is not universal. In some RDBMS like Oracle you have to take some steps to deal with mixed case in a column.
Now to deal with what you actually want, which is NOT (starting with A).
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE name NOT LIKE 'A%';
your question should have more detail however you can use the substr function
SELECT name FROM yourtable
WHERE SUBSTR(name,1,1) <> 'A'
complete list of mysql string functions here
mysql docs
NOT REGXP operator
MySQL NOT REGXP is used to perform a pattern match of a string expression expr against a pattern pat. The pattern can be an extended regular expression.
Syntax:
expr NOT REGEXP pat
Query:
SELECT * FROM emp_table WHERE emp_name NOT REGEXP '^[a]';
or
SELECT * FROM emp_table WHERE emp_name NOT REGEXP '^a';
Anyone have a clue how I could go about trying to select a certain pattern of numbers with a 1 at the end?
Ex.
SELECT pattern FROM table WHERE pattern REGEXP '1_2+2_2+3_2+4_2&2016-06-09&1';
or
SELECT pattern FROM table WHERE pattern REGEXP '2_1&2016-06-09&1';
using the same number-underscore-number, ampersand, date, ampersand, number; just as long as that number 1 is at the end?
EDIT:
Actually, let me phrase it better. How do I use REGEXP to select an ampersand and the number 1 at the end of a string?
You don't need regex. Just use LIKE:
LIKE '%&1'
The % makes it not be anchored to the start of the string. LIKE is not regex, but closer to a glob syntax. It may be faster than regex, too.
The LIKE operator is used in a WHERE clause to search for a specified pattern in a column.
SELECT column_name
FROM table
WHERE column_name LIKE '%&1';
Note:
You can also use LIKE operator for searching from start not only from end.
Here is an Example.
SELECT column_name
FROM table
WHERE column_name LIKE '&1%';
I'm trying to select all rows that contain only alphanumeric characters in MySQL using:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column REGEXP '[A-Za-z0-9]';
However, it's returning all rows, regardless of the fact that they contain non-alphanumeric characters.
Try this code:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column REGEXP '^[A-Za-z0-9]+$'
This makes sure that all characters match.
Your statement matches any string that contains a letter or digit anywhere, even if it contains other non-alphanumeric characters. Try this:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column REGEXP '^[A-Za-z0-9]+$';
^ and $ require the entire string to match rather than just any portion of it, and + looks for 1 or more alphanumberic characters.
You could also use a named character class if you prefer:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column REGEXP '^[[:alnum:]]+$';
Try this:
REGEXP '^[a-z0-9]+$'
As regexp is not case sensitive except for binary fields.
There is also this:
select m from table where not regexp_like(m, '^[0-9]\d+$')
which selects the rows that contains characters from the column you want (which is m in the example but you can change).
Most of the combinations don't work properly in Oracle platforms but this does. Sharing for future reference.
Try this
select count(*) from table where cast(col as double) is null;
Change the REGEXP to Like
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE column_name like '%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%'
this one works fine
SELECT * FROM t WHERE c REGEXP '.*\(..\).*';
This didn't work. It returned many rows whose c contain string that have more than two characters in ().
SELECT * FROM t WHERE c LIKE '%(__)%'
SQL Fiddle here
Your escapes are off.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/regexp.html#operator_regexp
Because MySQL uses the C escape syntax in strings (for example, “\n” to represent the newline character), you must double any “\” that you use in your REGEXP strings.
Use:
SELECT * FROM t WHERE c REGEXP '.*\\(..\\).*';
How are you running this query? If you're using it in (say) a PHP script, and writing it like this:
$sql = "SELECT ... REGEXP '.*\(..\).*';";
then the PHP interpreter will actually be stripping out those backslashes, producing the real query
... REGEXP '.*(..).*';
which would simply be any record that has at least two characters. For this to work properly, you'll have to double-escape:
$sql = "SELECT ... REGEXP '.*\\(..\\).*';";
PHP will strip off one of the backslashes from each set, leaving the second one to actually reach mysql.
What's the difference between
SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foobar='$foo'
AND
SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foobar LIKE'$foo'
= in SQL does exact matching.
LIKE does wildcard matching, using '%' as the multi-character match symbol and '_' as the single-character match symbol. '\' is the default escape character.
foobar = '$foo' and foobar LIKE '$foo' will behave the same, because neither string contains a wildcard.
foobar LIKE '%foo' will match anything ending in 'foo'.
LIKE also has an ESCAPE clause so you can set an escape character. This will let you match literal '%' or '_' within the string. You can also do NOT LIKE.
The MySQL site has documentation on the LIKE operator. The syntax is
expression [NOT] LIKE pattern [ESCAPE 'escape']
LIKE can do wildcard matching:
SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foobar LIKE "Foo%"
If you don't need pattern matching, then use = instead of LIKE. It's faster and more secure. (You are using parameterized queries, right?)
Please bear in mind as well that MySQL will do castings dependent upon the situation: LIKE will perform string cast, whereas = will perform int cast. Considering the situation of:
(int) (vchar2)
id field1 field2
1 1 1
2 1 1,2
SELECT *
FROM test AS a
LEFT JOIN test AS b ON a.field1 LIKE b.field2
will produce
id field1 field2 id field1 field2
1 1 1 1 1 1
2 1 1,2 1 1 1
whereas
SELECT *
FROM test AS a
LEFT JOIN test AS b ON a.field1 = b.field2
will produce
id field1 field2 id field1 field2
1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 2 1 1,2
2 1 1,2 1 1 1
2 1 1,2 2 1 1,2
According to the MYSQL Reference page, trailing spaces are significant in LIKE but not =, and you can use wildcards, % for any characters, and _ for exactly one character.
I think in term of speed = is faster than LIKE. As stated, = does an exact match and LIKE can use a wildcard if needed.
I always use = sign whenever I know the values of something. For example
select * from state where state='PA'
Then for likes I use things like:
select * from person where first_name like 'blah%' and last_name like 'blah%'
If you use Oracle Developers Tool, you can test it with Explain to determine the impact on the database.
The end result will be the same, but the query engine uses different logic to get to the answer. Generally, LIKE queries burn more cycles than "=" queries. But when no wildcard character is supplied, I'm not certain how the optimizer may treat that.
With the example in your question there is no difference.
But, like Jesse said you can do wildcard matching
SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foobar LIKE "Foo%"
SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foobar NOT LIKE "%Foo%"
More info:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-comparison-functions.html
A little bit og google doesn't hurt...
A WHERE clause with equal sign (=) works fine if we want to do an exact match. But there may be a requirement where we want to filter out all the results where 'foobar' should contain "foo". This can be handled using SQL LIKE clause alongwith WHERE clause.
If SQL LIKE clause is used along with % characters then it will work like a wildcard.
SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foobar LIKE'$foo%'
Without a % character LIKE clause is very similar to equal sign alongwith WHERE clause.
In your example, they are semantically equal and should return the same output.
However, LIKE will give you the ability of pattern matching with wildcards.
You should also note that = might give you a performance boost on some systems, so if you are for instance, searching for an exakt number, = would be the prefered method.
Looks very much like taken out from a PHP script. The intention was to pattern-match the contents of variable $foo against the foo database field, but I bet it was supposed to be written in double quotes, so the contents of $foo would be fed into the query.
As you put it, there is NO difference.
It could potentially be slower but I bet MySQL realises there are no wildcard characters in the search string, so it will not do LIKE patter-matching after all, so really, no difference.
In my case I find Like being faster than =
Like fetched a number of rows in 0.203 secs the first time then 0.140 secs
= returns fetched the same rows in 0.156 secs constantly
Take your choice
I found an important difference between LIKE and equal sign = !
Example: I have a table with a field "ID" (type: int(20) ) and a record that contains the value "123456789"
If I do:
SELECT ID FROM example WHERE ID = '123456789-100'
Record with ID = '123456789' is found (is an incorrect result)
If I do:
SELECT ID FROM example WHERE ID LIKE '123456789-100'
No record is found (this is correct)
So, at least for INTEGER-fields it seems an important difference...