Using square brackets ( [ ] ) as escape characters

Use square brackets as escape characters for the percent sign, the underscore, and the left bracket. The right bracket does not need an escape character; use it by itself. If you use the hyphen as a literal character, it must be the first character inside a set of square brackets.

Table 4-8 shows examples of square brackets used as escape characters with like.

Table 4-8: Using square brackets to search for wildcard characters

like predicate

Meaning

like "5%"

5 followed by any string of 0 or more characters

like "5[%]"

5%

like "_n"

an, in, on (and so on)

like "[_]n"

_n

like "[a-cdf]"

a, b, c, d, or f

like "[-acdf]"

-, a, c, d, or f

like "[[ ]"

[

like "]"

]

like “[[]ab]”

[]ab