How can I escape square brackets in a LIKE clause?

Question

I am trying to filter items with a stored procedure using like. The column is a varchar(15). The items I am trying to filter have square brackets in the name.

For ex

Answer 1

There is a problem in that whilst:

LIKE 'WC[[]R]S123456' 

and:

LIKE 'WC\[R]S123456' ESCAPE '\'

Both work for SQL Server but neither work for Oracle.

It seems that there is no ISO/IEC 9075 way to recognize a pattern involving a left brace.

Answer 2

According to documentation:

You can use the wildcard pattern matching characters as literal characters. To use a wildcard character as a literal character, enclose the wildcard character in brackets.

You need to escape these three characters %_[:

'5%'      LIKE '5[%]'      -- true
'5$'      LIKE '5[%]'      -- false
'foo_bar' LIKE 'foo[_]bar' -- true
'foo$bar' LIKE 'foo[_]bar' -- false
'foo[bar' LIKE 'foo[[]bar' -- true
'foo]bar' LIKE 'foo]bar'   -- true

Answer 3

If you would need to escape special characters like '_' (underscore), as it was in my case, and you are not willing/not able to define an ESCAPE clause, you may wish to enclose the special character with square brackets '[' and ']'.

This explains the meaning of the "weird" string '[[]' - it just embraces the '[' character with square brackets, effectively escaping it.

My use case was to specify the name of a stored procedure with underscores in it as a filter criteria for the Profiler. So I've put string '%name[_]of[_]a[_]stored[_]procedure%' in a TextData LIKE field and it gave me trace results I wanted to achieve.

Here is a good example from the documentation: LIKE (Transact-SQL) - Using Wildcard Characters As Literals

Answer 4

LIKE 'WC[[]R]S123456' 

or

LIKE 'WC\[R]S123456' ESCAPE '\'

Should work.