Wildcard and dealing with spaces

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Wildcard and dealing with spaces

Ctalley13

Old Hand

Points: 332
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May 18, 2021 at 12:48 am

#3884628
Hello All,
I am new to the SQL realm and at work I use SQL Studio.
I have a question in regards to wildcards.
I am searching distinctly for a string value in a column.
I want to only look up patients by this specific string value.
It is this (verbatim): ‘LifeCare Amb MH’
the coding structure I use is:
select top 5*
from Integration.Encounter where [Facility] like ‘%LifeCare Amb MH%’
table - Integration.Encounter
column - Facility
string value - LifeCare Amb MH
SQL does not like that where statement line.
I believe it’s because of the spacing of the words when trying to use a wildcard.
How do I work with the spacing issue? It is a real string in a column. Just can’t seem how to get around the spacing issue.
All the help is greatly appreciated.
thank you!
- This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Ctalley13.
May 18, 2021 at 5:02 am

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May 18, 2021 at 7:37 am

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pietlinden SSC Guru Points: 63501 More actions · Answer 1

Are you searching for an exact match or just records that contain "LifeCare Amb MH"?

Since you didn't provide any consumable data, it's hard(er) to figure out what the problem is. If you want an exact match, you'd use

WHERE SomeColumn = 'LifeCare Amb MH’

if you want all the records where SomeColumn starts with that, you'd use

WHERE SomeColumn = 'LifeCare Amb MH%’

Ctalley13 Old Hand Points: 332 More actions · Answer 2

I apologize in advance, my wording in the original post was wrong.

the table is - Integration.Encounter

the column is - Facility

specific string value I am trying to find in the facility column is: LifeCare Amb MH

referring back to the original chunk of code,

I used:

select top 5*

from integration.Encounter

where Facility like ‘%LifeCare Amb MH%’

I want to find in the dataset all the patients that have a string value of LifeCare Amb MH.

however, I don’t know how to work around the spacing of the string when trying to use the wildcard to find all patients with that value.

thank you

pietlinden SSC Guru Points: 63501 More actions · Answer 3

If you're trying to do an exact match, it's just:

WHERE [ColumnName] = 'LifeCare Amb MH'

Starts with and ends with is easy:

WHERE [ColumnName] LIKE 'LifeCare Amb MH%'

WHERE [ColumnName] LIKE '%LifeCare Amb MH'

The fun starts where you have multiple spaces between each word. is that what's happening in your data?

ScottPletcher SSC Guru Points: 101093 More actions · Answer 4

Ctalley13 wrote:

SQL does not like that where statement line.

What specifically do you mean by that? What error message did you get?

SQL DBA,SQL Server MVP(07, 08, 09) "It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear." "Norm", on "Cheers". Also from "Cheers", from "Carla": "You need to know 3 things about Tortelli men: Tortelli men draw women like flies; Tortelli men treat women like flies; Tortelli men's brains are in their flies".