Introduction to MaxCompute LIKE - MaxCompute - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

LIKE is an operator used for SQL pattern matching. It is typically used with the WHERE clause of a SELECT statement to filter string data that matches a specific pattern. This topic describes common wildcard characters in LIKE and provides examples of how to use them.

Precaution

MaxCompute SQL supports only the UTF-8 character set. If data is encoded in other formats, the calculation results may be incorrect.

LIKE wildcard characters

% matches any number of characters.
_ matches a single character.

If you want to match the % or _ character itself, you must escape it. For example: \\% matches the character %. \\_ matches the character _.

Examples

Example 1: The result is true.
```
select 'abcd' like 'ab%'; 
```
Example 2: The result is false.
```
select 'abcd' like 'ab_';
```
Example 3: The result is true.
```
select 'ab_cde' like 'ab\\_c%';
```

References

For more precise character matching or replacement, see RLIKE.