Sql server® 2012 t-sql fundamentals

The 

ESCAPE

 Character

If you want to search for a character that is also used as a wildcard, (such as %, _, [, or ]), you can use 

an escape character. Specify a character that you know for sure doesn’t appear in the data as the es-

cape character in front of the character you are looking for, and specify the keyword ESCAPE followed 

by the escape character right after the pattern. For example, to check whether a column called col1 

contains an underscore, use col1 LIKE ‘%!_%’ ESCAPE ‘!’. 

For the wildcards %, _, and [ you can use square brackets instead of an escape character. For ex-

ample, instead of col1 LIKE ‘%!_%’ ESCAPE ‘!’ you can use col1 LIKE ‘%[_]%’.