Finding Special Characters

[JohnHarkins]

How do I do a "find" for a special character (e.g., asterisk, forward or backward slash, question mark) within a column of a table or within a query? Presumably there are some special characters that tell the query engine to consider the following character(s) literally.

Thanks!
John Harkins

 

[WildHare]

Are you looking just to return the special character, or the field's contents, IF it contains the special character?

In a query, a criteria of LIKE "*/*" will return the field if ANY character in it is a backslash. The asterisks are delimiters indicating ANY character, as they have been since the dawn of time..

You can also use EDIT/Search off the menu system if you want to do this interactively versus programmatically.

Jim Hare
"Remember, you're unique - just like everonone else"

http://www.jmhare.com

 

[tlbroadbent]

If you are using the LIKE predicate, you can search for wildcards and other special characters embedded in a colmn by enclosing the character in brackets.

Where colname Like "*[*]*"

You can also use the Instr function.

WHERE InStr(ColName,"*&quot)>0
Terry L. Broadbent - DBA
Computing Links:

http://tlbroadbent.home.attbi.com/prog.htm

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