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7.7.2 SIMILAR TO Regular Expressions

string SIMILAR TO pattern [ESCAPE escape-character]
string NOT SIMILAR TO pattern [ESCAPE escape-character]

The SIMILAR TO operator returns true or false depending on whether its pattern matches the given string. It is similar to LIKE, except that it interprets the pattern using the SQL standard's definition of a regular expression. SQL regular expressions are a curious cross between LIKE notation and common regular expression notation.

Like LIKE, the SIMILAR TO operator succeeds only if its pattern matches the entire string; this is unlike common regular expression behavior where the pattern can match any part of the string. Also like LIKE, SIMILAR TO uses _ and % as wildcard characters denoting any single character and any string, respectively (these are comparable to . and .* in POSIX regular expressions).

In addition to these facilities borrowed from LIKE, SIMILAR TO supports these pattern-matching metacharacters borrowed from POSIX regular expressions:

• | denotes alternation (either of two alternatives).
• * denotes repetition of the previous item zero or more times.
• + denotes repetition of the previous item one or more times.
• ? denotes repetition of the previous item zero or one time.
• {m} denotes repetition of the previous item exactly m times.
• {m,} denotes repetition of the previous item m or more times.
• {m,n} denotes repetition of the previous item at least m and not more than n times.
• Parentheses () can be used to group items into a single logical item.
• A bracket expression [...] specifies a character class, just as in POSIX regular expressions.

Notice that the period (.) is not a metacharacter for SIMILAR TO.

As with LIKE, a backslash disables the special meaning of any of these metacharacters; or a different escape character can be specified with ESCAPE.

Some examples:

'abc' SIMILAR TO 'abc'      true
'abc' SIMILAR TO 'a'        false
'abc' SIMILAR TO '%(b|d)%'  true
'abc' SIMILAR TO '(b|c)%'   false

The substring function with three parameters, substring(string from pattern for escape-character), provides extraction of a substring that matches an SQL regular expression pattern. As with SIMILAR TO, the specified pattern must match the entire data string, or else the function fails and returns null. To indicate the part of the pattern that should be returned on success, the pattern must contain two occurrences of the escape character followed by a double quote ("). The text matching the portion of the pattern between these markers is returned.

Some examples, with #" delimiting the return string:

substring('foobar' from '%#"o_b#"%' for '#')   oob
substring('foobar' from '#"o_b#"%' for '#')    NULL