NAME
SQL Anchored Wildcards for SQL SELECT..LIKE terms, version 1.0
OVERVIEW
Now that so many people have the majority of their search experience with Web search engines, the fact that SQL SELECT..LIKE search terms are anchored by default is a real pain.
For example, when searching for 'zipper' embedded in sentences like:
The zipper was invented in...
on the Web, you just specify
zipper
as your search term. Not so in SQL interfaces -- you must
specify
%zipper%
so that the SQL LIKE term can find 'zipper' anywhere in
the data. This confuses most people, as they expect:
zipper
without the '%'s will work just fine. Since most people
where I work are not SQL-literate, this posed a problem.
So, SQL::AnchoredWildcards was born. It exports a single function, sql_anchor_wildcards(), which takes an anchored SQL LIKE-like search pattern (a pattern that also supports '^' and '$' as beginning and ending anchors) as in:
^zipper
and converts it to the true SQL LIKE term:
zipper%
with appropriate quoting for literal '^' and '$' chars.
PREREQUISITES
In order to install and use this package you will need Perl version 5.004 or better. It has only been actually tested on 5.005_02+.
INSTALLATION
Just follow the usual procedure:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
The file sqlwildcards.html is HTML user-level documentation that explains all of the SQL wildcards available with SQL::AnchoredWildcards -- '^', '$', '%', and '_'.
Comments, questions, criticisms to:
Mark Leighton Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics 317-587-3190 Indianapolis, IN
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Leighton Fisher. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.