I am using SQL and need to check if a string contains a certain substring using regular expressions. Lower and upper case letters and space are allowed.
Currently, I have Where description = '/^[a-zA-Z\s]mysubstring[a-zA-Z\s]$/'
But it is not working for some reason. Any idea?
MySQL regex is not supporting the same syntax as PHP PCRE regex. If you want to use a regex check, you must use the REGEXP operator. Next, it does not support \s and other shorthand classes, you need to replace it with a [:space:] POSIX character class.
Also, MySQL REGEXP will perform a case insensitive regex check by default, but you still can use [A-Za-z] just in case you have non-standard options.
Use
WHERE description REGEXP '^[a-zA-Z[:space:]]*mysubstring[a-zA-Z[:space:]]*$'
If you do not care about what there is in the entries and you just need to find those containing your string, use LIKE with % (=any text) wildcard:
WHERE description LIKE '%mysubstring%'
WHERE description REGEXP '^[[:alpha:][:space:]]*mysubstring[[:alpha:][:space:]]*$'WHERE description LIKE '%mysubstring%'will find entries that may contain more than just letters and whitespace. Ke Zhang, please check what is working for you best.