How to avoid certain characters in MySQL full text search?

Question

I have a column named parcel_number of varchar type. It contains values like ab-cd-ef and uvwxyz. A search for abcdef or uv-wx-yz does not return those records.

How should I write the query to meet this requirement?

Answer 1

This situation seems to be the result of a bad design decision.

As this column is not storing human readable content, but is to be used as an identifier, the content of this column should have a uniform structure, either with or without the dashes, but not mixing them! You'd also have a hard time having a UNIQUE constraint on this column...

I'd recommend stripping the dashes from the table:

UPDATE table SET parcel_number = replace(parcel_number,'-', '');

MySQL replace reference

Then you only have to strip the dashes from the the search string too. I assume ab-cd-ef is the same as abcdef. Do note however that doing so means a-bcd-ef and ab-cd-ef will be treated as being the same.