Posted on Thursday, January 29th (5558 days ago)

Sometimes I have to make mini search engines. Several engines later, I still never realized I could use regex in MySQL. Ok, this is more for me than you I suppose, but I found the information so interesting I had to save it here: The basic syntax to use regular expressions in a MySQL query is:

SELECT something FROM table WHERE column REGEXP 'regexp'

For example, to select all columns from the table events where the values in the column id end with 5587, use:

SELECT * FROM events WHERE id REGEXP '5587$'

A more elaborate example selects all columns of the table reviews where the values in the column description contain the word excellent:

SELECT * FROM reviews WHERE description REGEXP '[[:<:]]excellent[[:>:]]'

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.