Laravel: Escape "LIKE" clause?

The other answer forgets about escaping the escape character itself, here is a more robust solution:

/** * Escape special characters for a LIKE query. * * @param string $value * @param string $char * * @return string */function escape_like(string $value, string $char = '\\'): string{    return str_replace(        [$char, '%', '_'],        [$char.$char, $char.'%', $char.'_'],        $value    );}

Temporary solution:

$search = Input::query('sSearch', '');if($search !== '') {    $escSearch = Util::escapeLike($search);    $paginatedBookings->where('first_name', 'LIKE', '%' . $escSearch . '%');    $paginatedBookings->orWhere('last_name', 'LIKE', '%' . $escSearch . '%');}class Util {    public static function escapeLike($str) {        return str_replace(['\\', '%', '_'], ['\\\\', '\%', '\_'], $str);    }}

reference

I was hoping for something database-agnostic and more robust. I think you can change the escape char in MySQL, although I don't know why you would.

This problem occurs especially when we want to query on a polymorphic related table.As an example, I wanted to find a column value named App\Example\Files by querying with like. But it failed because of the backslash.

While testing, I found that we need "4 backslashes" for the Laravel side and for the mysql side. For the query to work properly.

I also verified this with the toSql () method. As a result, the output of the mysql query was like this and it worked:

select `file` from `examples` where file like '%App\\\\Example\\\\Files%'

I wrote a little helper function to do the backslash correction

before:

  DB::table('examples')    ->select('file')    ->whereRaw("state like '%App\Example\Files%'")    ->toSql();

incorrect output:

select `file` from `examples` where file like '%App\Example\Files%'

after

function handle_backslash($value) :string {    return str_replace('\\', '\\\\\\\\', $value);}DB::table('examples')    ->select('file')    ->whereRaw("file like '%" . handle_backslash('App\Example\Files') . "%'")    ->toSql();

correct output:

select `file` from `examples` where file like '%App\\\\Example\\\\Files%'