使用 SQL Server LIKE 模式搜索“全字匹配”

Question

Does anyone have a LIKE pattern that matches whole words only?

It needs to account for spaces, punctuation, and start/end of string as word boundaries.

I am not using SQL Full Text Search as that is not available. I don't think it would be necessary for a simple keyword search when LIKE should be able to do the trick. However if anyone has tested performance of Full Text Search against LIKE patterns, I would be interested to hear.

Edit:

I got it to this stage, but it does not match start/end of string as a word boundary.

where DealTitle like '%[^a-zA-Z]pit[^a-zA-Z]%' 

I want this to match "pit" but not "spit" in a sentence or as a single word.

Eg DealTitle might contain "a pit of despair" or "pit your wits" or "a pit" or "a pit." or "pit!" or just "pit".

Answer 1

Full text indexes is the answer.

The poor cousin alternative is

'.' + column + '.' LIKE '%[^a-z]pit[^a-z]%'

FYI unless you are using _CS collation, there is no need for a-zA-Z

Answer 2

I think the recommended patterns exclude words with do not have any character at the beginning or at the end. I would use the following additional criteria.

where DealTitle like '%[^a-z]pit[^a-z]%' OR 
  DealTitle like 'pit[^a-z]%' OR 
  DealTitle like '%[^a-z]pit'

I hope it helps you guys!

Answer 3

you can just use below condition for whitespace delimiters:

(' '+YOUR_FIELD_NAME+' ') like '% doc %'

it works faster and better than other solutions. so in your case it works fine with "a pit of despair" or "pit your wits" or "a pit" or "a pit." or just "pit", but not works for "pit!".

Answer 4

Another simple alternative:

WHERE DealTitle like '%[^a-z]pit[^a-z]%' OR 
      DealTitle like '[^a-z]pit[^a-z]%' OR 
      DealTitle like '%[^a-z]pit[^a-z]'

Answer 5

This is a good topic and I want to complement this to someone how needs to find some word in some string passing this as element of a query.

SELECT 
    ST.WORD, ND.TEXT_STRING
FROM 
    [ST_TABLE] ST
LEFT JOIN 
    [ND_TABLE] ND ON ND.TEXT_STRING LIKE '%[^a-z]' + ST.WORD + '[^a-z]%'
WHERE 
    ST.WORD = 'STACK_OVERFLOW' -- OPTIONAL

With this you can list all the incidences of the ST.WORD in the ND.TEXT_STRING and you can use the WHERE clausule to filter this using some word.

Answer 6

Surround your string with spaces and create a test column like this:

 SELECT t.DealTitle 
 FROM yourtable t
 CROSS APPLY (SELECT testDeal = ' ' + ISNULL(t.DealTitle,'') + ' ') fx1
 WHERE fx1.testDeal LIKE '%[^a-z]pit[^a-z]%'

Answer 7

If you can use regexp operator in your SQL query..

For finding any combination of spaces, punctuation and start/end of string as word boundaries:

where DealTitle regexp '(^|[[:punct:]]|[[:space:]])pit([[:space:]]|[[:punct:]]|$)'

Answer 8

Try using charindex to find the match:

Select * 
from table 
where charindex( 'Whole word to be searched', columnname) > 0

Answer 9

You could search for the entire string in SQL:

select * from YourTable where col1 like '%TheWord%'

Then you could filter the returned rows client site, adding the extra condition that it must be a whole word. For example, if it matches the regex:

\bTheWord\b

Another option is to use a CLR function, available in SQL Server 2005 and higher. That would allow you to search for the regex server-side. This MSDN artcile has the details of how to set up a dbo.RegexMatch function.