The string I am searching for begins and ends with a wildcard character

Question

How can I select only values that start and end with square brackets?

I have written

LIKE '[%]'

but it does not return anything. How can I work around this?

Yes but that did not pop up in my searches. This one is worded more directly — Who Dis, Apr 26 '21 at 16:05

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 26 '21 at 16:03

4

You need to escape the square brackets, because they are special characters in SQL Server LIKE patterns (square braces delineate character classes):

where col like '\[%\]'

If you don't like backslashes, you can use:

where col like '$[%$]' escape '$'

or not use LIKE at all:

where left(col, 1) = '[' and right(col, 1) = ']'

edited Apr 26 '21 at 16:03

Stu

30,392
6
14
33

answered Apr 26 '21 at 15:06

Gordon Linoff

1,242,037
58
646
786

in your last query the first ] should be a ' – Geoff Griswald Apr 26 '21 at 15:48

The string I am searching for begins and ends with a wildcard character

1 Answers1