How to bind LIKE values using the PDO extension?

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You could also say:

SELECT wrd FROM tablename WHERE wrd LIKE CONCAT(:partial, '%')

to do the string joining at the MySQL end, not that there’s any particular reason to in this case.

Things get a bit more tricky if the partial wrd you are looking for can itself contain a percent or underscore character (since those have special meaning for the LIKE operator) or a backslash (which MySQL uses as another layer of escaping in the LIKE operator — incorrectly, according to the ANSI SQL standard).

Hopefully that doesn’t affect you, but if you do need to get that case right, here’s the messy solution:

$stmt= $db->prepare("SELECT wrd FROM tablename WHERE wrd LIKE :term ESCAPE '+'");
$escaped= str_replace(array('+', '%', '_'), array('++', '+%', '+_'), $var);
$stmt->bindParam(':term', $escaped);

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