Chapter 4: Expressions, Identifiers, and Wildcard Characters

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

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