SQL Query with LIKE doesn't work unless % is at end

Question

I am new to SQL and learning about LIKE. I installed PostgreSQL and started running commands via psql in the command line. Everything works as expected, except the following query:

SELECT *
FROM movie
WHERE mov_title LIKE '%an Beauty';

which failed to find the movie with mov_title = 'American Beauty'.

However, this one does work:

SELECT *
FROM movie
WHERE mov_title LIKE 'American B%';

Playing around, I realized that the query works if and only if the % is the last character in the string. However, looking at the documentation for LIKE, there is no need for % to be the last character, so I'm stumped. Would greatly appreciate some ideas.

EDIT: I was asked for some data, so here it is:

mov_id  |                     mov_title
--------+----------------------------------------------------
922     | Aliens
905     | Amadeus
914     | American Beauty

There are other columns but they are not relevant to the question. mov_id is the primary key.

EDIT 2: Here is info on the movie database. Apparently mov_id is not the primary key after all.

Answer 1

My guess is that this movie title has some kind of trailing whitespace or other characters in it. Try the following query:

SELECT *
FROM movie
WHERE mov_title LIKE '%an Beauty%';

If this works, then it means that perhaps something is following Beauty in the movie title.

Edit:

When using LENGTH on a CHAR column in Postgres, trailing whitespace characters are not included in the count. This, along with a handful of other quirks, are reasons why it is generally preferable to use VARCHAR rather than CHAR .