Re: Retrieving partial field values

[Ian Grant]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 08:19:07 -0800 (PST)
Kentucky Families <kyfamilies@stripped> wrote:

> This is a huge database so the option of using LIKE to bring up
> everything beginning with the search term will result in too many
> hits. I need a way to isolate these entries and search them on whole
> words.

If you have control over input format then you could store multiple
values as say, ':Stott::Statt::Stutt:' and then search thus:

SELECT * FROM people WHERE surname LIKE '%:statt:%'

which will only match whole words. Better would be regular expressions
capable of matching word boundaries, like perl's \b and \B patterns, but
MySQL doesn't do that AFAIK.