MySQL® Crash Course

Chapter 9. Searching Using Regular Expressions

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use regular expressions within MySQL WHERE clauses for greater control over data filtering.

Understanding Regular Expressions

The filtering examples in the previous two chapters enabled you to locate data using matches, comparisons, and wildcard operators. For basic filtering (and even some not-so-basic filtering) this might be enough. But as the complexity of filtering conditions grows, so does the complexity of the WHERE clauses themselves.

And this is where regular expressions become useful. Regular expressions are special strings (sets of characters) that are used to match text. If you needed to extract phone numbers from a text file, you might use a regular expression. ...