What MySQL LIKE wildcard should I use to return someone's name without their title/prefix name? - sql

Question

I want to return name of customers and order them, but their titles must be excluded in ordering.
SELECT name
FROM customers
WHERE name LIKE ...
ORDER BY name
I mean by 'their titles' is such as Dr., Sn., Lady, Sir, Mr., and Mrs.

Answer 1

Possible solution to your problem.
In Oracle:
regexp_replace(user_name, '^(MISS|MS\.|MS|MRS\.|MRS|MR\.|MR)\s*', '') as user_name
Also you can use REPLACE () function like:
REPLACE (user_name, 'MISS', '') as user_name
If you have a column structure like (mr | mrs | other) / space / username you can try this:
with users(user_name) as
(select 'mr user name1' from dual union all
select 'miss username2 ' from dual union all
select 'other username 3' from dual )
select substr(user_name,instr(user_name,' ')+1) real_username from users
Output:
REAL_USERNAME
----------------
username 1
username 2
username 3
In MSSQL:
DECLARE #str VARCHAR(500)='Mr Sam'
SELECT Title,
first_name,
Substring(NAME, CASE
WHEN Charindex(' ', NAME) = 0 THEN 1
ELSE Charindex(' ', NAME)
END, Len(NAME)) last_name
FROM (SELECT CASE
WHEN LEFT(#str, Charindex(' ', #str)) IN( 'Mr', 'Mrs', 'Miss' ) THEN LEFT(#str, Charindex(' ', #str))
ELSE ''
END AS Title,
CASE
WHEN LEFT(#str, Charindex(' ', #str)) IN ( 'Mr', 'Mrs', 'Miss' ) THEN LEFT(Stuff(#str, 1, Charindex(' ', #str), ''), Charindex(' ', Stuff(#str, 1, Charindex(' ', #str), '')))
ELSE LEFT(#str, Charindex(' ', #str))
END AS first_name,
CASE
WHEN LEFT(#str, Charindex(' ', #str)) IN ( 'Mr', 'Mrs', 'Miss' ) THEN Stuff(#str, 1, Charindex(' ', #str), '')
ELSE #str
END NAME) a

Answer 2

Technically using a % before their name will allow any prefix, which would get you the desired result (ex. WHERE name LIKE ('%' + #name). However, this is not the recommended approach on larger data sets as you will see significant performance issues with this approach.

Answer 3

You need to be more specific. First of all: Which SQL "flavor" are you using? Postgres? Oracle? MySql? This is very important because each engine has different functions. Every time you ask an SQL question in SO, be sure to include at the very least a tag mentioning which DBMS you're using.
Now, what do you mean by "I shouldn't return them". Do you mean you should not return records which have a prefix, or do you mean you need to return the records but without the prefix? (So if you have Dr. Henry Gutierrez, do you exclude him from the result? Or have it output as Henry Gutierrez?)
This is also a good place for another tip: Always write an expected output in your questions. "If X is Y then I expect the output to be this:"
If you need to exclude them entirely, you can use a REGEXP match (Once again, I cannot list a specific function because I have no idea which type of SQL you're using) Something like WHERE REGEXP(UPPER(COL)) NOT ('^(MS|MR)\s+.*$')
If it's the 2nd case, that's going to be much harder because you'd need to get a substring which excludes the prefix, but the prefixes all have different sizes so you can't just write a "one size fits all"
In general, it's a bad normalization practice to have prefixes in your SQL database. You should have a column called PREFIX and another column for the name itself.
EDIT: Based on your answer. This is the closest you can get to achieving what you want.
SELECT NAME
FROM (SELECT NAME,
CASE WHEN NAME LIKE 'MR %' THEN SUBSTRING(NAME, 4)
WHEN NAME LIKE 'MRS %' THEN SUBSTRING(NAME, 5)
ELSE NAME AS NAME2
FROM YOUR_TABLE ORDER BY NAME2) AS SUBQ
I am 99% sure this will not return the results ordered though, because the select order might be ignored outside of the subquery, so you can also just try whats in the subquery in a main query instead, but this will output 2 columns.
***My reply is in pseudocode. It is not exactly MySql syntax, you will need to check MySql documentation for the actual substring function implementation it has and for the CASE syntax.