"Michael van Rooyen" <mvanr@bigfoot.com> writes:
> The following query from psql:
> select * from product where name like '%\\%';
> Yields products whose names end with a %. I would have expected it to yeild
> products whose names contained a backslash.
Postgres defaults to assuming \ as the LIKE escape character, that is,
what you typed is equivalent to
select * from product where name like '%\\%' escape '\\';
You can get the behavior you're expecting by not having any escape character:
select * from product where name like '%\\%' escape '';
This is as explained in TFM:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/functions-matching.html#FUNCTIONS-LIKE
although I notice that SQL92 says that there is no escape character by
default. We can't change our historical documented behavior on the
point unless we were willing to provide a configuration variable to
adjust it, and I'm not sure it's worth that.
regards, tom lane