Question:
I have a table in which the key field has a value stored with a percent sign, like ‘1234%’.Using this value, I want to select from another table that can have values like ‘1234567’, ‘1234678’ and ‘1234098’. How do I go about it?
Answer:
The percent sign (%) is a wildcard in SQL Server. It can be used at the beginning or end of a string. So the following syntax will return all of the records you mentioned:
SELECT * FROM TestTable WHERE Col LIKE '1234%'Col-------123456712346781234098
If you want to do an exact match for ‘1234’ without the percent sign, then you’ll have to trim off the last character, like this:
SELECT * FROM TestTable WHERE Col LIKE LEFT('1234%', (LEN('1234%')-1))
