SELECT * FROM Grade_Theory WHERE 'The funcdamental particle is called 
+a quark, Bob!' LIKE '%'||Answer||'%'
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Ideally you need to understand the importance of the key words in the answers.

So let us try and build up a dynamic query that tries to find important words. Your initial SQL starts off :-

SELECT * FROM Grade_Theory
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SELECT RowID, Question,Answer
  FROM Grade_Theory
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my @words = split /\W+/, 'The funcdamental particle is called a quark,
+ Bob!';
my @parts = ();
for (@words) {
  push @parts, "Answer like '%$_%'";
}
my $where_clause = join (" or\n",@parts);

my $sql = "SELECT RowID, Question,Answer
             FROM Grade_Theory
            WHERE $where_clause";

print "$sql\n";
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SELECT RowID, Question,Answer
             FROM Grade_Theory
            WHERE Answer like '%The%' or
Answer like '%funcdamental%' or
Answer like '%particle%' or
Answer like '%is%' or
Answer like '%called%' or
Answer like '%quark%' or
Answer like '%Bob%'
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my @words = split /\W+/, 'The funcdamental particle is called a quark,
+ Bob!';
my @long_words=();
for (@words) {
  push @long_words, $1 if (/^(\w{3,})$/);
}
my @parts = ();
for (@long_words) {
  push @parts, "Answer like '%$_%'";
}
my $where_clause = join (" or\n",@parts);

my $sql = "SELECT RowID, Question,Answer
             FROM Grade_Theory
            WHERE $where_clause";

print "$sql\n";
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SELECT RowID, Question,Answer
             FROM Grade_Theory
            WHERE Answer like '%The%' or
Answer like '%funcdamental%' or
Answer like '%particle%' or
Answer like '%called%' or
Answer like '%quark%' or
Answer like '%Bob%'
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Hope it helps
UnderMine

Please post your code. Your Perl code, that is. Until then, I'd hazard a guess that the SQL LIKE operator is not what you want, as it uses a pattern to search for in a column value, whereas your column value is the pattern to be searched for in the answer string.

I think you need to look for a pattern in the answer string using Perl.

This is a poor approach to testing users' answers. What if I get "What animal is considered man's best friend?" and I don't know the answer. All I have to do is provide "cat parrot dog wolf lion fish hamster" as my answer and I'll get it correct. Regular expressions probably aren't the way to go here. Unless this isn't a very important quiz at all and you don't care about such trivial things :)

$ create table foo (bar varchar);
$ insert into foo(bar) values('quark');
$ select * from foo where 'something about quarks and stuff' like '%'|
+|bar||'%';
  bar  
-------
 quark
(1 row)
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SELECT * FROM Grade_Theory WHERE *Question* = 'The funcdamental partic
+le is called a quark, Bob!'
# now out the answer in the var $answer
if($user_answer =~ !$answer!)
{
 # okay
}
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