%LIKE% retrieves eg. WOMEN DATA when calling MEN - php

Question

$itemList = DB::table('items')
->orderBy('id', 'desc')
->where('item_status', 2)
->where(function($query) use($queryArr)
{
foreach($queryArr as $uID){
$query->whereRaw("tags LIKE '%$uID%'");
}
})->paginate(21);
I have been facing this issue since a long time. Problem when you do a LIKE search is it grabs the data of WOMEN when it's just eg MEN
Mainly because MEN is inside Women
I also tried the following but failed(This sort of grab a word) men without women data
$query->where('tags', 'LIKE', '%'.$uID.'%');
SELECT 'a word a' REGEXP '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]';
How do i use that Word boundary query in laravel query builder
Tried this and still failed $query->whereRaw("tags LIKE REGEXP '[[:<:]]Men[[:>:]]'");
SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'REGEXP '[[:<:]]Men[[:>:]]')' at line 1 (SQL: select count(*) as aggregate from items where item_status = ? and (tags LIKE REGEXP '[[:<:]]Men[[:>:]]')) (Bindings: array ( 0 => 2, ))
I also understand some asked why not just created a proper way of handling these item's category. Well i think for now using Full Text Search is fine for me at most when it come to scaling i will use elastic search. true?
UPDATE
Apologies for not giving an example of tags
Bag,Shoes,Men,Wedges
Bag,Shoes,Men
Men,Shoes,Bag

Answer 1

If values are separated by commas, try to use following
WHERE `tags` REGEXP "(^|,)men(,|$)"
This will require to have comma or end of string around the word men.

Answer 2

Your REGEXP solution is throwing the syntax error because of the extra LIKE keyword. The correct syntax is simply WHERE column REGEXP 'pattern'.
If you find this hard to remember, try using RLIKE instead, which is a synonym for MySQL's REGEXP. There is less chance you will accidentally write WHERE column LIKE RLIKE ... in your query because it is more obviously redundant.
The pattern itself should work fine. Personally, I dislike using those word boundary classes in MySQL; since you know your tags are comma delimited and space padded, [ ,]Man[ ,] would function just as well. The word boundary class breaks at punctuation other than underscores, so you could run into trouble if you have tags that are hyphenated, for instance.
If you want to use multiple word tags with spaces, either of the previous patterns is buggy. In that case I would try to stick with commas as your delimiter, get rid of the whitespace padding and use anchors instead, as suggested in one of the other answers: (^|,)Man($|,)

Answer 3

In your query you said : Find anything that contains the tag 'MEN' => '%MEN%', that's why it shows: WOMEN AND MEN, so to answer to your question you should use starts with instead of contains, like this :
$query->where('tags', 'LIKE', $uID.'%');