SQL like search substring starts with

Question

I have many books in my MySQL database. And I am looking for the specific book headers. For example, I know how to find every header begins with the word "dan":

SELECT * FROM books WHERE header LIKE 'dan%';

But how to find a word (substring) inside the header that begins with the certain phrase?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here's a quick and dirty trick: A word begins with dan can either be at the beginning of a header or after a space, so:

SELECT * FROM books WHERE header LIKE 'dan%' OR header like '% dan%';

Answer 2

A slight simplification is the following logic, which puts a space at the beginning of the header:

SELECT *
FROM books
WHERE ' ' || header LIKE ' dan%';

The only issue is that concatenating the string depends on the database and the question doesn't mention the database. So it might also be:

WHERE ' ' + header LIKE ' dan%';

or

WHERE CONCAT(' ', header) LIKE ' dan%';