Hmm. If you really need to do it with a percent character you could use REGEXP instead of LIKE and write your own REGEXP parser … > The REGEXP operator is a special syntax for the regexp() user function. No regexp() user function is defined by default and so use of the REGEXP operator will normally result in an error message. If an application-defined SQL function named "regexp" is added at run-time, then the "X REGEXP Y" operator will be implemented as a call to "regexp(Y,X)". … but that's a lot of work and I would probably choose a different solution.