Wildcards in MS Access SQL

Question

I've written this SQL query in MS Access:

SELECT *
FROM Students
WHERE name  like '_a*'

Which produces no results, even though I have names like danny and sara in the Students table. THe '_' wildcard doesn't seem to work.

BTW,

like '*a*'

does return all names with a in them.

And ideas?

I would look at this related article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/719115/microsoft-jet-wildcards-asterisk-or-percentage-sign — JeffO, Aug 23 '10 at 14:27
You're mixing wildcard families -- if you're using * then for single characters, you use ?; if you're using % then for single characters it's _. — David-W-Fenton, Aug 23 '10 at 19:56

mavnn · Accepted Answer · 2010-08-23T11:37:23.140

2

In Access query builder's dialect of sql, you need ? not _. If you connect to the same mdb backend via odbc you'll need to go back to using the standard wildcards.

See this page for details.

edited Aug 23 '10 at 11:37

answered Aug 23 '10 at 11:26

mavnn

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For the full explanation, though, @Jeff O's citation is essential: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/719115/microsoft-jet-wildcards-asterisk-or-percentage-sign – David-W-Fenton Aug 23 '10 at 19:55
Thanks David! (few more characters) – mavnn Aug 24 '10 at 08:04

Wildcards in MS Access SQL

1 Answers1