How can I escape square brackets in a LIKE clause?

Question

LIKE 'WC[[]R]S123456' 

or

LIKE 'WC\[R]S123456' ESCAPE '\'

Should work.

Let's say you want to match the literal its[brac]et.

You don't need to escape the ] as it has special meaning only when it is paired with [.

Therefore escaping [ suffices to solve the problem. You can escape [ by replacing it with [[].

I needed to exclude names that started with an underscore from a query, so I ended up with this:

WHERE b.[name] not like '\_%' escape '\'  -- use \ as the escape character

Here is what I actually used:

like 'WC![R]S123456' ESCAPE '!'

The ESCAPE keyword is used if you need to search for special characters like % and _, which are normally wild cards. If you specify ESCAPE, SQL will search literally for the characters % and _.

Here's a good article with some more examples

SELECT columns FROM table WHERE 
    column LIKE '%[[]SQL Server Driver]%' 

-- or 

SELECT columns FROM table WHERE 
    column LIKE '%\[SQL Server Driver]%' ESCAPE '\'

If you would need to escape special characters like '_' (underscore), as it was in my case, and you are not willing/not able to define an ESCAPE clause, you may wish to enclose the special character with square brackets '[' and ']'.

This explains the meaning of the "weird" string '[[]' - it just embraces the '[' character with square brackets, effectively escaping it.

My use case was to specify the name of a stored procedure with underscores in it as a filter criteria for the Profiler. So I've put string '%name[_]of[_]a[_]stored[_]procedure%' in a TextData LIKE field and it gave me trace results I wanted to achieve.

Here is a good example from the documentation: LIKE (Transact-SQL) - Using Wildcard Characters As Literals