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How do you escape a question mark character in a string on the MySQL CLI?

There are many methods to avoid having to escape characters, but from an ease-of-use perspective I would quite like to do some SELECT statements containing LIKE queries, some of which contain question marks and the usual \? does not work.

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1 Answer

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LIKE doesn't use ?. LIKE uses % and _.

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Same question with a WHERE = then. – Metalshark Dec 8 '10 at 14:33
= doesn't use any wildcards. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Dec 8 '10 at 14:35
I am looking for the string <a href="/about?param=value"> in a CMS. Performing SELECT uid FROM cms_table WHERE html LIKE '%/about%' works, however SELECT uid FROM cms_table WHERE html LIKE '%/about?%' doesn't. I cannot seem to escape the question mark and make it part of the statement. The same thing happens when using a plain WHERE =. – Metalshark Dec 8 '10 at 14:39
Thank you! There is something weird going on with this database, I'll look at character encodings... – Metalshark Dec 8 '10 at 14:53

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