LIKE
Introduction to PostgreSQL LIKE operator
Suppose that you want to find customers, but you don’t remember their names exactly. However, you can recall that their names begin with something like Jen
.
How do you locate the exact customers from the database? You can identify customers in the customer
table by examining the first name column to see if any values begin with Jen
. However, this process can be time-consuming, especially when the customer
table has a large number of rows.
Fortunately, you can use the PostgreSQL LIKE
operator to match the first names of customers with a string using the following query.
SELECT
first_name,
last_name
FROM
customer
WHERE
first_name LIKE 'Jen%';
Output:
first_name | last_name
------------+-----------
Jennifer | Davis
Jennie | Terry
Jenny | Castro
(3 rows)
The WHERE
clause in the query contains an expression,
first_name LIKE 'Jen%'
The expression consists of the first_name
, the LIKE
operator and a literal string that contains a percent sign (%
). The string 'Jen%'
is called a pattern.
The query returns rows whose values in the first_name
column begin with Jen
and are followed by any sequence of characters. This technique is called pattern matching.
You construct a pattern by combining literal values with wildcard characters and using the LIKE
or NOT LIKE
operator to find the matches.
PostgreSQL offers two wildcards:
Percent sign (
%
) matches any sequence of zero or more characters.Underscore sign (
_
) matches any single character.
Here’s the basic syntax of the LIKE
operator,
value LIKE pattern
The LIKE
operator returns true
if the value
matches the pattern
. To negate the LIKE
operator, you use the NOT
operator as follows
value NOT LIKE pattern
The NOT LIKE
operator returns true
when the value
does not match the pattern
.
If the pattern does not contain any wildcard character, the LIKE
operator behaves like the equal (=
) operator.
PostgreSQL LIKE operator examples
Let’s take some examples of using the LIKE
operator
1) Basic LIKE operator examples
The following statement uses the LIKE
operator with a pattern that doesn’t have any wildcard characters
SELECT 'Apple' LIKE 'Apple' AS result;
Output:
result
--------
t
(1 row)
In this example, the LIKE
operator behaves like the equal to (=
) operator. The query returns true
because ‘Apple' = 'Apple'
is true
.
The following example uses the LIKE
operator to match any string that starts with the letter A
SELECT 'Apple' LIKE 'A%' AS result;
Output:
result
--------
t
(1 row)
The query returns true because the string 'Apple'
starts with the letter 'A'
.
2) Using the LIKE operator with table data
The following example uses the LIKE
operator to find customers whose first names contain the string er
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer
WHERE first_name LIKE '%er%'
ORDER BY first_name;

3) Using the LIKE operator a pattern that contains both wildcards
The following example uses the LIKE
operator with a pattern that contains both the percent ( %
) and underscore (_
) wildcards
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer
WHERE first_name LIKE '_her%'
ORDER BY first_name;

The pattern _her%
matches any strings that satisfy the following conditions:
The first character can be anything.
The following characters must be
'her'
.There can be any number (including zero) of characters after
'her'
.
4) PostgreSQL NOT LIKE examples
The following query uses the NOT LIKE
operator to find customers whose first names do not begin with Jen
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer
WHERE first_name NOT LIKE 'Jen%'
ORDER BY first_name;

PostgreSQL extensions of the LIKE operator
PostgreSQL ILIKE
operator, which is similar to the LIKE
operator, but allows for case-insensitive matching. For example
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer
WHERE first_name ILIKE 'BAR%';

In this example, the BAR%
pattern matches any string that begins with BAR
, Bar
, BaR
, and so on. If you use the LIKE
operator instead, the query will return no row.
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer
WHERE first_name LIKE 'BAR%';
Output:
first_name | last_name
------------+-----------
(0 rows)
PostgreSQL also provides some operators that mirror the functionality of LIKE
, NOT LIKE
, ILIKE
, NOT ILIKE
, as shown in the following table.
~~
LIKE
~~*
ILIKE
!~~
NOT LIKE
!~~*
NOT ILIKE
For example, the following statement uses the ~~
operator to find a customer whose first names start with the string Dar
SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM customer
WHERE first_name ~~ 'Dar%'
ORDER BY first_name;
Output:
first_name | last_name
------------+-----------
Darlene | Rose
Darrell | Power
Darren | Windham
Darryl | Ashcraft
Daryl | Larue
(5 rows)
PostgreSQL LIKE operator with ESCAPE option
Sometimes, the data, that you want to match, contains the wildcard characters %
and _
. For example.
The rents are now 10% higher than last month
The new film will have _ in the title
To instruct the LIKE
operator to treat the wildcard characters %
and _
as regular literal characters, you can use the ESCAPE
option in the LIKE
operator
string LIKE pattern ESCAPE escape_character;
Creating Table,
CREATE TABLE t(
message text
);
INSERT INTO t(message)
VALUES('The rents are now 10% higher than last month'),
('The new film will have _ in the title');
SELECT message FROM t;
Output:
message
----------------------------------------------
The rents are now 10% higher than last month
The new film will have _ in the title
(2 rows)
The following statement uses the LIKE
operator with the ESCAPE
option to treat the %
followed by the number 10
as a regular character.
SELECT * FROM t
WHERE message LIKE '%10$%%' ESCAPE '$';
Output:
message
----------------------------------------------
The rents are now 10% higher than last month
(1 row)
In the pattern %10$%%
, the first and last %
are the wildcard characters whereas the %
appears after the escape character $
is a regular character.
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