LOCATE

Return the position of the first occurrence of a substring. This function finds the starting position of a substring within a string.

Syntax

LOCATE(substr,str), LOCATE(substr,str,pos)

Description

The first syntax returns the position of the first occurrence of substring substr in string str. The second syntax returns the position of the first occurrence of substring substr in string str, starting at position pos. Returns 0 if substr is not in str.

LOCATE() performs a case-insensitive search.

If any argument is NULL, returns NULL.

INSTR() is the same as the two-argument form of LOCATE(), except that the order of the arguments is reversed.

Examples

SELECT LOCATE('bar', 'foobarbar');
+----------------------------+
| LOCATE('bar', 'foobarbar') |
+----------------------------+
|                          4 |
+----------------------------+

SELECT LOCATE('My', 'Maria');
+-----------------------+
| LOCATE('My', 'Maria') |
+-----------------------+
|                     0 |
+-----------------------+

SELECT LOCATE('bar', 'foobarbar', 5);
+-------------------------------+
| LOCATE('bar', 'foobarbar', 5) |
+-------------------------------+
|                             7 |
+-------------------------------+

See Also

• INSTR() ; Returns the position of a string within a string

• SUBSTRING_INDEX() ; Returns the substring from string before count occurrences of a delimiter

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