% or _ in the WHERE variable LIKE clause

[essjay_d12]

What does % do in the WHERE something LIKE clause and what are the others I can use, is there a full list that would be accessible to me?

thanks

d

[fenway]

This is a wildcard character that matches any number of characters. There's also the underscore (_), which matches a single characters. These let you find anothing that starts with 'q', or is a two-letter word starting with 'a', etc. Kind of like * and . in Perl regexs. Speaking of which, you can also match on regexs... the refman has a laundry list of the ones available. Just remember that indexes get become totally useless when you use these, so use with caution.