Finding %, _ and other Special Characters in SQL

Less than one minute read time.

I have just spent a frustrating few minutes trying to quickly find where '%' codes are used in translations. Of course '%' is a special wild card character in SQL. The same is true for '_' and other characters.

Don't do:

select capt_code, capt_family
from custom_captions
where capt_code like '%%%'

This gives nonsense results.

But either of these will work to find the data

select capt_code, capt_family
from custom_captions
where capt_code like '%[%]%'

OR

select capt_code, capt_family
from custom_captions
where capt_code like '%\%%' escape '\'

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