Spring Data JPA Like or Containing

Question

I'm messing with Spring Boot Data JPA and, reading the documentation, I got confused. Whats the difference?

What I understood is, the "Like" operator makes SQL without the "%" surrounding my String (where name like 'String') and the "Containing" operator makes SQL with the "%" surrounding my String (where name like '%String%'). Am I wrong?

I used the "Like" operator and he works fine in situations where the "%" is required in both sides so, I'm really confused!

Answer 1

It is correct that you can emulate a containing with a like.

The differences are:

• you have to enclose your search string with wildcards yourself when using like.
• you can have wildcards not only at the beginning or end but also in the middle, multiple wildcards in the middle and different wildcards like _ which matches a single character.
• a final subtile difference is that containing will escape wildcards contained in your search argument, which like would not. So when searching for abc%def the two behave differently

                  | containing     | like (with additional `%` around the searchstring)
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  123abc%def456   | matches        | matches
  123abcXYZdef456 | does not match | matches