LIKE MySQL搜索周围的空格

Question

I have a query as follow:

$stmt = $conn->prepare("
SELECT news_feed.title, shows.name, shows.id, news_feed.news_id 
FROM news_feed 
JOIN shows 
ON news_feed.title 
LIKE concat('%', shows.name, '%')");

Basically it takes my table shows (with tv shows names) and look for tv shows in another table with headlines that are scraped from television news source. The issue is that I recently added the show 'ER' and that anytimes I have a headline which contains ER (that's a lot of headlines), it makes a connection between the show and the headline. To avoid this issue, I want to capture the shows.name surrounded by two spaces. I read up on stackoverflow that a good way to do so is to the brackets like so:

LIKE concat('%[]', shows.name, '[]%')");

but that doesn't work. What else can I try ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with the use of '[]' in a LIKE expression. I would have used concat('% ', shows.name, ' %') instead.

Answer 2

I'd go with a regular expression for this:

WHERE shows.name RLIKE '(^|[[:blank:][:punct:]])er($|[[:blank:][:punct:]])'

This checks for (beginning of string or punctuation or blank) followed by ER followed by (end of string or punctuation or blank). I tested it with these positive values and it worked:

• ER
• That ER show
• Watch ER!

It also kept out values like Another show and err, what?

Addendum : here's the full query:

SELECT
  news_feed.title,
  shows.name,
  shows.id,
  news_feed.news_id
FROM news_feed
JOIN shows ON news_feed.title
   RLIKE CONCAT('(^|[[:blank:][:punct:]])', shows.name, '($|[[:blank:][:punct:]])')

There's a SQL Fiddle here .