LIKE Regular Expression

Here’s a great trick to find specific patterns for a column. The LIKE CLAUSE can be use as a RegEx

Here’s a link to LIKE from Microsoft.

Using Wildcard Characters As Literals

You can use the wildcard pattern matching characters as literal characters. To use a wildcard character as a literal character, enclose the wildcard character in brackets. The following table shows several examples of using the LIKE keyword and the [ ] wildcard characters.

Symbol	Meaning
LIKE ‘5[%]’	5%
LIKE ‘[_]n’	_n
LIKE ‘[a-cdf]’	a, b, c, d, or f
LIKE ‘[-acdf]’	-, a, c, d, or f
LIKE ‘[ [ ]’	[
LIKE ‘]’	]
LIKE ‘abc[_]d%’	abc_d and abc_de
LIKE ‘abc[def]’	abcd, abce, and abcf

 

In this example, I want to find all user names that starts with the letter “S” and is follow by numbers 0-9.