MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Searching for Substrings

Problem

You want to know whether a given string occurs within another string.

Solution

Use LOCATE().

Discussion

The LOCATE() function takes two arguments representing the substring that you’re looking for and the string in which to look for it. The return value is the position at which the substring occurs, or 0 if it’s not present. An optional third argument may be given to indicate the position within the string at which to start looking.

mysql>SELECT name, LOCATE('in',name), LOCATE('in',name,3) FROM metal;
+----------+-------------------+---------------------+
| name     | LOCATE('in',name) | LOCATE('in',name,3) |
+----------+-------------------+---------------------+
| copper   |                 0 |                   0 |
| gold     |                 0 |                   0 |
| iron     |                 0 |                   0 |
| lead     |                 0 |                   0 |
| mercury  |                 0 |                   0 |
| platinum |                 5 |                   5 |
| silver   |                 0 |                   0 |
| tin      |                 2 |                   0 |
+----------+-------------------+---------------------+

LOCATE() uses the collation of its arguments to determine whether the search is case-sensitive. See Recipes and for information about changing the comparison properties of the arguments if you want to change the search behavior.