Oh you that know so much. Read my revised answer above. No way to talk with you so I re-raise issue here in this answer which you will hate too, but you are wrong. And of all things, years ago I used the phpdelusions site to learn how to convert my interactive sql to prepared statement, and when I ran into the placeholder issue with like, I realized the flaw in like. One can put the % into the form value, such as j%o%e If you think I'm wrong, try it out yourself. Or use the Google. Ban me. One can't know everything. Bye. Have a good life. What you have here without mentioning this is teach people bad coding style.