For my edification (select column using PHP) ...

[phporcaffeine]

I had a query like this :

SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM tbl WHERE col5 LIKE 'myText'

and that returned an empty result set when in fact there were rows that it should have found ...

so then I googled and found something to try, when I tried this query:

SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM tbl WHERE col5 LIKE '%myText%'

it worked.

My question is why did '%' make a difference?  I have tried to find the answer on mysql.com but no luck.

-TIA

[Jessica]

% is the wildcard character. It means any number of characters in this spot.