NAME

SQL Anchored Wildcards for SQL SELECT..LIKE terms, version 1.0



OVERVIEW

Now that so many people have the majority of their search
experience with Web search engines, the fact that SQL
SELECT..LIKE search terms are anchored by default is a
real pain.

For example, when searching for 'zipper' embedded in
sentences like:
	The zipper was invented in...
on the Web, you just specify
	zipper
as your search term.  Not so in SQL interfaces -- you must
specify
	%zipper%
so that the SQL LIKE term can find 'zipper' anywhere in
the data.  This confuses most people, as they expect:
	zipper
without the '%'s will work just fine.  Since most people
where I work are not SQL-literate, this posed a problem.

So, SQL::AnchoredWildcards was born.  It exports a single
function, sql_anchor_wildcards(), which takes an anchored
SQL LIKE-like search pattern (a pattern that also supports
'^' and '$' as beginning and ending anchors) as in:
	^zipper
and converts it to the true SQL LIKE term:
	zipper%
with appropriate quoting for literal '^' and '$' chars.



PREREQUISITES

In order to install and use this package you will need Perl version
5.004 or better.  It has only been actually tested on 5.005_02+.



INSTALLATION

Just follow the usual procedure:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

The file sqlwildcards.html is HTML user-level documentation that
explains all of the SQL wildcards available with
SQL::AnchoredWildcards -- '^', '$', '%', and '_'.



Comments, questions, criticisms to:

Mark Leighton Fisher		Thomson Consumer Electronics
317-587-3190			Indianapolis, IN
fisherm@tce.com



COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Leighton Fisher. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. 

