Exclude punctuation from SQL LIKE query

Question

I am running a SQL query looking for exact words or phrases (user decides at run time). So the request might be to look for the phrase "plays catch"

The SQL query that I create would be similar to this:

SELECT * 
FROM NOTES 
WHERE DETAIL LIKE "plays catch %" 
   OR DETAIL LIKE "% plays catch %";

Because the user will be looking for an exact phrase I put the space after "catch" and before the "%" because I want to avoid a similar but different word such as "Catch-up".

So the problem comes with handling punctuation such as a period or a comma.

My query now unfortunately will exclude a note with the detail of

John plays catch.

but will include

John plays catch with his dog.

Does anybody know of a simple way to have basic punctuation ignored in a SQL query?

BTW, this is my first post on your forum so happy to accept guidance if I've mis-stepped in this post.

Answer 1

If your database supports regular expressions, then you can handle it that way. For instance:

SELECT *
FROM NOTES 
WHERE ' ' || DETAIL REGEXP ' plays catch[ ,.!?]' ;

( || is the standard operator for string concatenation, although some databases do not support it.)

Or you could use the word delimiter ( '\\w' ) if that is appropriate.

If you database does not, you can use REPLACE() :

SELECT *
FROM NOTES 
WHERE REPLACE(REPLACE(' ' || DETAIL, ',', ' '), '.', ' ') LIKE '% plays catch %' ;

Answer 2

SELECT *
FROM testing
WHERE alphanum(test) LIKE CONCAT('%', alphanum('plays catch'), '%')