rhiozan

Alright, I've had a some nightmares with it already so i bow my stupid head to the almighty hive-mind. I run a small DB with the codes for spare parts. The codes are alphanumerical and i need some proper way to search for them. They can include special chars like parentheses (), and/or @, #, &, $, <, >. So the codes could look like: "A", "Bb", "2C8", "A7(BO)19", "B29H$", "29H(6JI)0#", "29H(6JI)0#<O>", etc The problem is that all these special chars in codes are optional. And the user should be able to find the code by at least its alphabetical part. So the query is something like: SELECT * FROM table WHERE column REGEXP '^[a-z0-9\@\#\$\&\<>()]* AND column LIKE CONCAT('%', '$user_value', '%') The DB doesnt return me "S(LJ)9" or "09S(LJ)3$" if i seek for "SLJ" or "S(LJ)" Would appreciate any help.