BINARY Operator

Cast a string to a binary string. This operator converts a character string to a binary string, often used for case-sensitive comparisons.

This page describes the BINARY operator. For details about the data type, see Binary Data Type.

Syntax

BINARY

Description

The BINARY operator casts the string following it to a binary string. This is an easy way to force a column comparison to be done byte by byte rather than character by character. This causes the comparison to be case sensitive even if the column isn't defined as BINARY or BLOB.

BINARY also causes trailing spaces to be significant.

Examples

SELECT 'a' = 'A';
+-----------+
| 'a' = 'A' |
+-----------+
|         1 |
+-----------+

SELECT BINARY 'a' = 'A';
+------------------+
| BINARY 'a' = 'A' |
+------------------+
|                0 |
+------------------+

SELECT 'a' = 'a ';
+------------+
| 'a' = 'a ' |
+------------+
|          1 |
+------------+

SELECT BINARY 'a' = 'a ';
+-------------------+
| BINARY 'a' = 'a ' |
+-------------------+
|                 0 |
+-------------------+

See Also

• Operator Precedence

_{This page is licensed: GPLv2, originally from fill_help_tables.sql}