LIKE operator- change symbol for [all characters]

Question

I have an input parameter which contains symbols "*" (star symbol), example:
i_search_par := 'country * street';
I gonna do query:
select * from SearchTable
where col1 like i_search_par;
I want that the "*" would act the same way as "%"-symbol in LIKE operator.
So i want that query would return such results:
'country 1 street'
'country 200 street'
and so on.
What is the better way to achieve this, that "*" is going to be interpreted as a "any number of any symbols"?
Maybe i can say something like:
SET SESSION ANYCHAR SYMBOL = "*".
And after doing that Oracle understands in LIKE operators that star-symbol is like i want?
Or should i really do string replacement by replacing ""%" to "*" in "i_search_par" and in other 30 such varaibles?

Answer 1

Hi,
Sorry, I don't think there's any way to tell LIKE to use different wildcards.
CharlesRoos wrote:
I have ca 30 input parameters:
i_search_par1 := 'country * street';
i_search_par2 := 'country * street';
i_search_par30 := 'country * street';Wouldn't it be just as easy to say:
i_search_par1 := 'country % street';
i_search_par2 := 'country % street';
i_search_par30 := 'country % street';?
>
And i will use them all like this:
select * from T
where Col1 like i_search_par1
and Col2 like i_search_par2
and
Col30 like i_search_par30You could write a very simple user-defined function. It would be slower, but the query would be a tiny bit simpler:
select * from T
where my_like (Col1, i_search_par1) = 1
and   my_like (Col2, i_search_par2) = 1
and   my_like (Col30, i_search_par30) = 1
Then you suggest that i sgould do string replacement 30 times for each parameter?Do you mean 1 time for each parameter, or 30 times altogether? Yes.
Isn't there better solution?
Maybe database has instruction that changes interpetation of symbol "*" into "%".It would be handy, but I don't think such a thing exists.