Hi, Suppse I have a column in my database called Description with the the following rows in the coumn: I am an artist I am an art teacher and i want to check to see if any of the rows in that column contain the word "art" - art as its own word, not as part of a word. so i use this peiece of code to find the records that have art and print them to the page: $query = "select Description from TableName where (Description like '%art%')"; while ($row = @mysql_fetch_array($query , MYSQL_ASSOC)) { print $row{'Description'} . "<br>"; } however the above code with the like statement returns both the records, where as I only want to return the second record that has "art" - as its a match for a whole word in that row, not as part of a word (ie. the like statement sees "art" as a match with "artist", but i dont want it too. am i making sense? if so, can the above code be modified too do what i want. thanks Richard