MySQL LIKE not working as expected

Question

I am not getting the expected search result from my code , This is a segment from my SQL Table

        Nom      Description 

        41099    Screen truck Hire for Northern Racing
        41100    Dry Hire - Screen
        41101    Dry Hire - Kit
        41102    Screen Truck Hire for chester / Bangor Dee
        41103    Blackburn Digiboard Backup DVD-DO NOT USE       

This is my PHP code and I am getting the expected results until I search for 'chester' , when I get no result . Can anyone tell me what is going wrong please ?

PHP Code to retrun XML Data

   echo '<sites>'  ; 


    $condition = "Description LIKE '%chester%' ";
    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM jbe_nominal_codes WHERE $condition")  ;

    while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { 
$nom  = $row['nominal'] ;
if (!$nom) { $nom= "0000" ; } ; 

$des  = $row['Description'] ;
if (!$des) { $des= "No Description" ; } ; 

    echo "<NameSearch> " ; 

echo '<nominal>';
echo $nom;
echo '</nominal>'; 

echo '<Description>' ;
echo $des ; 
echo '</Description>' ;


   echo "</NameSearch> " ; 
   } ;

Answer 1

a good practice is to extend your mysql_ statement.

mysql_query("SELECT * FROM jbe_nominal_codes WHERE $condition")or die(mysql_error());

if a error is thrown, you know there is something wrong in your query and you will get some hints from the error, if not, could it be that chester is not in the your db table at all?

like previously said, you should take note of mysqli and PDO and why you should not use mysql_ anymore. Why shouldn't I use mysql_* functions in PHP?