Closing bracket ']' in LIKE wildcard

Question

I have a query that looks a bit like this:

SELECT * FROM Stuff WHERE name LIKE '[a\]]%'

My goal is to match all names starting with a or ] (closed bracket). However, this seems to match everything starting with a] or \\].

Is this possible without OR, a lot of auto-generated LIKEs?

Answer 1

You have to escape the ]. That means before any character you want to literally search for, example % or _ or ], you have to add an escape character. For example \% to search for a literal %

Example:

CREATE TABLE #Test( text varchar(50) )

INSERT INTO #test  VALUES (']'),('atest'),('zz')

SELECT * FROM #test  WHERE text LIKE '[a\]]%' {escape '\'}

To read more about escape chars in LIKE, you can check :

LIKE Predicate Escape Character

You can also test it using SQL fiddle: SQL Fiddle