Getting value from database using equals while ignoring certain letters

Question

I have a column in MYSQL named 'text', and it has one value: "He?llo?". I'm trying to get the value "He?llo?" where using the equal to "Hello" to get it. It doesn't equal because "He?llo?" has 2 question marks inside of it, and "Hello" has none. My question is, is there a way to somehow remove the 2 question marks from "He?llo?" before comparing it to "Hello", so that it equals?

$text = "Hello";
SELECT text FROM table WHERE text = '$text';

Answer 1

You can use replace() :

SELECT text
FROM table
WHERE replace(text, '?', '') = '$text';

Answer 2

You could use replace as many times as you like. But this way of proceeding will require a full table scan, and if your table has many rows this is inefficient.

There are two alternatives :

• look into fulltext index. It could fit your needs, and if it does, it is the most efficient way to solve your problem.
• add a second column and fill it with the cleaned up text. Then you can compare your text in an efficient way,using the indexes.