What is MySQL REGEXP operator and how it handles pattern matching?

MySQL supports another type of pattern matching operation based on the regular expressions and the REGEXP operator. Following is the table of pattern, which can be used along with the REGEXP operator to handle the pattern matching.

Example

To illustrate the use of REGEXP we are using the table ‘Student_info’ having the following data −

mysql> Select * from Student_info;
+------+---------+------------+------------+
| id   | Name    | Address    | Subject    |
+------+---------+------------+------------+
|  101 | YashPal | Amritsar   | History    |
|  105 | Gaurav  | Chandigarh | Literature |
|  130 | Ram     | Jhansi     | Computers  |
|  132 | Shyam   | Chandigarh | Economics  |
|  133 | Mohan   | Delhi      | Computers  |
+------+---------+------------+------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now, followings are some queries that use the REGEXP to find the patterns of ‘Name’ from the above table −

mysql> Select Name from student_info WHERE Name REGEXP '^Y';
+---------+
| Name    |
+---------+
| YashPal |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.11 sec)

The above query will find all the names starting with ‘Y’.

mysql> Select name from student_info WHERE Name REGEXP 'am$';
+-------+
| name  |
+-------+
| Ram   |
| Shyam |
+-------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The above query will find all the names ending with ‘am’.

mysql> Select name from student_info WHERE Name REGEXP 'av';
+--------+
| name   |
+--------+
| Gaurav |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The above query will find all the names containing ‘av’.

mysql> Select name from student_info WHERE Name REGEXP '^[aeiou]|am$';
+-------+
| name  |
+-------+
| Ram   |
| Shyam |
+-------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Above query will find all the names starting with a vowel and ending with ‘am’.