Like Operator

LIKE can be a useful operator when you want to compare similar values.

EXAMPLE:

The movies table contains two films with similar titles, ‘Se7en’ and ‘Seven’.
How could we select all movies that start with ‘Se’ and end with ‘en’ and have exactly one character in the middle?

SELECT * 
FROM movies
WHERE name LIKE 'Se_en';

LIKE is a special operator used with the WHERE clause to search for a specific pattern in a column.
name LIKE 'Se_en' is a condition evaluating the name column for a specific pattern.
Se_en represents a pattern with a wildcard character.
_ can be replaced by any value


The percentage sign % is another wildcard character that can be used with LIKE.

EXAMPLE:

This statement below filters the result set to only include movies with names that begin with the letter ‘A’:

SELECT * 
FROM movies
WHERE name LIKE 'A%';

% is a wildcard character that matches zero or more missing characters in the pattern. For example:

A% matches all movies with names that begin with letter ‘A’
%a matches all movies that end with ‘a’

LIKE is not case sensitive.