Explain the use of sql LIKE operator using MySQL in Python?

LIKE is a operator in MySQL. The LIKE operator is used with the WHERE statement to search for a specific pattern in the table.

Suppose you want to search for values which start with “a” in the table, the LIKE statement is used in such scenarios.

There are two wildcard characters used with the LIKE clause.

• % − This sign represents zero,one or multiple characters.

• _ (underscore) − This represents one single character.

Example

LIKE ‘a%’ - Searches for all the values starting with a.

LIKE ‘%a’  -Searches for all the values which end with a.

LIKE ‘_a%’ - Searches for all the values where ‘a’ is at the second position. The _ represents a single character, the second character must be ‘a’ and after a there might be some characters present or not.

Syntax

SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE column_name LIKE pattern

Steps invloved in searching data based on some pattern in a table using MySQL in python

• import MySQL connector

• establish connection with the connector using connect()

• create the cursor object using cursor() method

• create a query using the appropriate mysql statements

• execute the SQL query using execute() method

• close the connection

Suppose we the following table named “Students” −

Students

+----------+-----------+
|    name  |    marks  |
+----------+-----------+
|    Rohit |    62     |
|    Rahul |    75     |
|    Inder |    99     |
|   Khushi |    49     |
|    Karan |    92     |
+----------+-----------+

We want to find the names of the students which start with ‘K’.

Example

import mysql.connector
db=mysql.connector.connect(host="your host", user="your username", password="your
password",database="database_name")

cursor=db.cursor()

query="SELECT name FROM Students WHERE name LIKE 'K%' "
cursor.execute(query)
names=cursor.fetchall()
for x in names:
   print(x)

db.close()

The above code fetches all the names from the table which start with ‘K’.

Output

Karan
Khushi

Similary, values can be serached based on various patterns using the above wildcards in any order.