How should I escape characters inside this LIKE query?

Question

I have a field in one of my tables that contains this string:

!\"#¤%&/()=?´`?=)(/&%¤#\"!\\\'\\\'\"\'

(Only for test purposes ofcour

Answer 1

Is not clear what you are trying to obtain and what is going wrong.

By the way, if you want to protect your query from SQL injection you should use mysql_real_escape_string
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html

Assuming that you are in PHP

$query = "SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE `column` LIKE '".mysql_real_escape_string($whatever)."'"

But you have to remember that LIKE operator has his own special chars (wildchars)
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-comparison-functions.html#operator_like

% Matches any number of characters, even zero characters
_ Matches exactly one character

So this chars must be escaped with backslash if you want to stop their magic

Assuming that you are in PHP I would do

// This removes magic on LIKE wildchars
$whatever = preg_replace('#(%|_)#', '\\$1', $input);

// This secures the query from sql injection 
// and hads the trailing % wildchars to the search string
$query = "SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE `column` LIKE '%".mysql_real_escape_string($whatever)."%'"