Developers generally tend to use characters such as % as a delimiter for storing data in an Oracle database. But because Oracle views the % character as a Wildcard character, it can’t use it as a delimiter effectively. Fortunately, Oracle provides a way out for such a problem?the ESCAPE character.

The ESCAPE keyword comes handy when you have a character in your data which is same as a Wildcard character.

Assume that a field called ObjectID in a table ObjectTable has a value:

1%4-t1%52-t2%145-t2%31-t

Now, suppose you want to retrieve all the values starting with 1% followed by any other characters. Your query will look like this:

SELECT ObjectID FROM ObjectTable WHERE ObjectID LIKE '1\%%' ESCAPE ''

Here the keyword ESCAPE and the character in the quotes () specifies that there is a escape character and the character is specified in the quotes.

This allows you to retrieve the following from the above query:

1%4-t1%52-t