I m trying to match beignning of words in a mysql column that stores strings as varchar. Unfortunately, REGEXP does not seem to work for UTF-8 strings as mentioned here
So,
select * from names where name REGEXP '[[:<:]]Aandre';
does not work if I have name like Foobar Aándreas
However,
select * from names where name like '%andre%'
matches the row I need but does not guarantee beginning of words matches.
Is it better to do the like and filter it out on the application side ? Any other solutions?
A citation from tha page you mentioned:
Warning
The REGEXP and RLIKE operators work in byte-wise fashion, so they are not multi-byte safe and may produce unexpected results with multi-byte character sets. In addition, these operators compare characters by their byte values and accented characters may not compare as equal even if a given collation treats them as equal.
select * from names where name like 'andre%'
select * from names where name like 'andre%' is not solution for eg:
name = 'richard andrew', because the string begining with richa... and not with andre...
for the moment, the temporaly solution, for search words (words != string) starting with a string
select * from names where name REGEXP '[[:<:]]andre';
But it no matching with accented words, eg: ándrew.
Any other solution, with regular expressions (mysql) to search in accented words?
Related
I want to return rows where certain fields follow a particular pattern such as whether a particular character in a string is a letter or number. To test it out, I want to return fields where the first letter is any letter. I used this code.
SELECT * FROM sales WHERE `customerfirstname` like '[a-z]%';
It returns nothing. So I would think that the criteria is the first character is a letter and then any following characters do not matter.
The following code works, but limits rows where the first character is an a.
SELECT * FROM sales WHERE `customerfirstname` like 'a%';
Am I not understanding pattern matching? Isn't it [a-z] or [A-Z] or [0-9] for any letter or number?
Also if I wanted to run this test on the second character in a string, wouldn't I use
SELECT * FROM `sales` WHERE `customerfirstname` like '_[a-z]%'
This is for SQL and MySQL. I am doing this in phpmyadmin.
You want to use regular expressions:
SELECT s.*
FROM sales s
WHERE s.customerfirstname REGEXP '^[a-zA-Z]';
This can be achieved with a regular expression.
SELECT * FROM sales WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(customerfirstname, '^[[:alpha:]]');
^ denotes the start of the string, while the [:alpha] character class matches any alphabetic character.
Just in case, here are a few others character classes that you may find useful :
alnum : dlphanumeric characters
digit: digit characters
lower : lowercase alphabetic characters
upper: uppercase alphabetic characters
See the mysql regexp docs for many more...
I want to return entries from a table that match the format:
prefix + optional spaces + Thai digit
Testing using ยก as the prefix I use the following SQL
SELECT term
FROM entries
WHERE term REGEXP "^ยก[\s]*[๐-๙]+$"
This returns 9 entries, 4 of which don't have the correct prefix, and none of them ends in a digit.
ยกนะ
ยกบัตร
ยกมือ
ยกยอ
ยกยอด
ยกหยิบ
ยมทูต
ยมนา
ยมบาล
ยมล
It doesn't return
ยก ๑
ยก ๒
which I know are in the database and are the entries I want.
I'm very new to all this. What am I doing wrong?
FWIW, this is against a MySQL database and everything is in Unicode.
Thanks
As quoted from the MySQL docs:
The REGEXP and RLIKE operators work in byte-wise fashion, so they are not multi-byte safe and may produce unexpected results with multi-byte character sets. In addition, these operators compare characters by their byte values and accented characters may not compare as equal even if a given collation treats them as equal.
Doesn't seem like MySQL's REGEXP can handle the [๐-๙] range correctly due to the above.
I use utf8_general_ci and try.I matched
ยกนะ
with "^ยก[\s]*[๐-๙]+$" but did't matched ยก ๑.So I change the regexp to
"^ยก[ ]*[๐-๙]+$"
,and it can match
ยกนะ
ยก ๑
Maybe the problem is character encoding.
I'm trying to write a MySQL query to identify first name fields that actually contain initials. The problem is that the query is picking up records that should not match.
I have tested against the POSIX ERE regex implementation in RegEx Buddy to confirm my regex string is correct, but when running in a MySQL query, the results differ.
For example, the query should identify strings such as:
'A.J.D' or 'A J D'.
But it is also matching strings like 'Ralph' or 'Terrance'.
The query:
SELECT *, firstname REGEXP '^[a-zA-z]{1}(([[:space:]]|\.)+[a-zA-z]{1})+([[:space:]]|\.)?$' FROM test_table
The 'firstname' field here is VARCHAR 255 if that's relevant.
I get the same result when running with a string literal rather than table data:
SELECT 'Ralph' REGEXP '^[a-zA-z]{1}(([[:space:]]|\.)+[a-zA-z]{1})+([[:space:]]|\.)?$'
The MySQL documentation warns about potential issues with REGEXP, I'm unsure if this is related to the problem I'm seeing:
Warning The REGEXP and RLIKE operators work in byte-wise fashion, so
they are not multi-byte safe and may produce unexpected results with
multi-byte character sets. In addition, these operators compare
characters by their byte values and accented characters may not
compare as equal even if a given collation treats them as equal.
Thanks in advance.
If you're testing this in the mysql client, you need to escape the backslashes. Each occurence of \. must turn into \\. This is necessary because your input is first processed by the mysql client, which turns \. into .. So you need to make it keep the backslashes by escaping them.
I'm looking to query a database of wine names, many of which contain accents (but not in a uniform way, and so similar wines may be entered with or without accents)
The basic query looks like this:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `wine_name` REGEXP '[[:<:]]Faugères[[:>:]]'
which will return entries with 'Faugères' in the title, but not 'Faugeres'
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `wine_name` REGEXP '[[:<:]]Faugeres[[:>:]]'
does the opposite.
I had thought something like:
SELECT *
FROM `table`
WHERE `wine_name` REGEXP '[[:<:]]Faug[eèêéë]r[eèêéë]s[[:>:]]'
might do the trick, but this only returns the results without the accents.
The field is collated as utf8_unicode_ci, which from what I've read is how it should be.
Any suggestions?!
You're out of luck:
Warning
The REGEXP and RLIKE operators work in byte-wise fashion, so they are
not multi-byte safe and may produce unexpected results with multi-byte
character sets. In addition, these operators compare characters by
their byte values and accented characters may not compare as equal
even if a given collation treats them as equal.
The [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] regexp operators are markers for word boundaries. The closest you can achieve with the LIKE operator is something on this line:
SELECT *
FROM `table`
WHERE wine_name = 'Faugères'
OR wine_name LIKE 'Faugères %'
OR wine_name LIKE '% Faugères'
As you can see it's not fully equivalent because I've restricted the concept of word boundary to spaces. Adding more clauses for other boundaries would be a mess.
You could also use full text searches (although it isn't the same) but you can't define full text indexes in InnoDB tables (yet).
You're certainly out of luck :)
Addendum: this has changed as of MySQL 8.0:
MySQL implements regular expression support using International Components for Unicode (ICU), which provides full Unicode support and is multibyte safe. (Prior to MySQL 8.0.4, MySQL used Henry Spencer's implementation of regular expressions, which operates in byte-wise fashion and is not multibyte safe.
Because REGEXP and RLIKE are byte oriented, have you tried:
SELECT 'Faugères' REGEXP 'Faug(e|è|ê|é|ë)r(e|è|ê|é|ë)s';
This says one of these has to be in the expression. Notice that I haven't used the plus(+) because that means ONE OR MORE. Since you only want one you should not use the plus.
utf8_general_ci see no difference between accent/no accent when sorting. Maybe this true for searches as well.
Also, change REGEXP to LIKE. REGEXP makes binary comparison.
To solve this problem, I tried different things, including using the binary keyword or the latin1 character set but to no avail.
Finally, considering that it is a MySql bug, I ended up replacing the é and è chars,
Like this :
SELECT *
FROM `table`
WHERE replace(replace(wine_name, 'é', 'e'), 'è', 'e') REGEXP '[[:<:]]Faugeres[[:>:]]'
I had the same problem trying to find every record matching one of the following patterns: 'copropriété', 'copropriete', 'COPROPRIÉTÉ', 'Copropri?t?'
REGEXP 'copropri.{1,2}t.{1,2} worked for me.
Basically, .{1,2} will should work in every case wether the character is 1 or 2 byte encoded.
Explanation: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/regexp.html
Warning
The REGEXP and RLIKE operators work in byte-wise fashion, so they are not multibyte safe and may produce unexpected results with multibyte character sets. In addition, these operators compare characters by their byte values and accented characters may not compare as equal even if a given collation treats them as equal.
I have this problem, and went for Álvaro's suggestion above. But in my case, it misses those instances where the search term is the middle word in the string. I went for the equivalent of:
SELECT *
FROM `table`
WHERE wine_name = 'Faugères'
OR wine_name LIKE 'Faugères %'
OR wine_name LIKE '% Faugères'
OR wine_name LIKE '% Faugères %'
Ok I just stumbled on this question while searching for something else.
This returns true.
SELECT 'Faugères' REGEXP 'Faug[eèêéë]+r[eèêéë]+s';
Hope it helps.
Adding the '+' Tells the regexp to look for one or more occurrences of the characters.
I'm working with a MySQL database that has some data imported from Excel. The data contains non-ASCII characters (em dashes, etc.) as well as hidden carriage returns or line feeds. Is there a way to find these records using MySQL?
MySQL provides comprehensive character set management that can help with this kind of problem.
SELECT whatever
FROM tableName
WHERE columnToCheck <> CONVERT(columnToCheck USING ASCII)
The CONVERT(col USING charset) function turns the unconvertable characters into replacement characters. Then, the converted and unconverted text will be unequal.
See this for more discussion. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-repertoire.html
You can use any character set name you wish in place of ASCII. For example, if you want to find out which characters won't render correctly in code page 1257 (Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian) use CONVERT(columnToCheck USING cp1257)
You can define ASCII as all characters that have a decimal value of 0 - 127 (0x00 - 0x7F) and find columns with non-ASCII characters using the following query
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE NOT HEX(COLUMN) REGEXP '^([0-7][0-9A-F])*$';
This was the most comprehensive query I could come up with.
It depends exactly what you're defining as "ASCII", but I would suggest trying a variant of a query like this:
SELECT * FROM tableName WHERE columnToCheck NOT REGEXP '[A-Za-z0-9]';
That query will return all rows where columnToCheck contains any non-alphanumeric characters. If you have other characters that are acceptable, add them to the character class in the regular expression. For example, if periods, commas, and hyphens are OK, change the query to:
SELECT * FROM tableName WHERE columnToCheck NOT REGEXP '[A-Za-z0-9.,-]';
The most relevant page of the MySQL documentation is probably 12.5.2 Regular Expressions.
This is probably what you're looking for:
select * from TABLE where COLUMN regexp '[^ -~]';
It should return all rows where COLUMN contains non-ASCII characters (or non-printable ASCII characters such as newline).
One missing character from everyone's examples above is the termination character (\0). This is invisible to the MySQL console output and is not discoverable by any of the queries heretofore mentioned. The query to find it is simply:
select * from TABLE where COLUMN like '%\0%';
Based on the correct answer, but taking into account ASCII control characters as well, the solution that worked for me is this:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE NOT `field` REGEXP "[\\x00-\\xFF]|^$";
It does the same thing: searches for violations of the ASCII range in a column, but lets you search for control characters too, since it uses hexadecimal notation for code points. Since there is no comparison or conversion (unlike #Ollie's answer), this should be significantly faster, too. (Especially if MySQL does early-termination on the regex query, which it definitely should.)
It also avoids returning fields that are zero-length. If you want a slightly-longer version that might perform better, you can use this instead:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `field` <> "" AND NOT `field` REGEXP "[\\x00-\\xFF]";
It does a separate check for length to avoid zero-length results, without considering them for a regex pass. Depending on the number of zero-length entries you have, this could be significantly faster.
Note that if your default character set is something bizarre where 0x00-0xFF don't map to the same values as ASCII (is there such a character set in existence anywhere?), this would return a false positive. Otherwise, enjoy!
Try Using this query for searching special character records
SELECT *
FROM tableName
WHERE fieldName REGEXP '[^a-zA-Z0-9#:. \'\-`,\&]'
#zende's answer was the only one that covered columns with a mix of ascii and non ascii characters, but it also had that problematic hex thing. I used this:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE NOT `column` REGEXP '^[ -~]+$' AND `column` !=''
In Oracle we can use below.
SELECT * FROM TABLE_A WHERE ASCIISTR(COLUMN_A) <> COLUMN_A;
for this question we can also use this method :
Question from sql zoo:
Find all details of the prize won by PETER GRÜNBERG
Non-ASCII characters
ans: select*from nobel where winner like'P% GR%_%berg';