Greetings Monks! I seek your wisdom!

I set up a basic SQL search using perl's DBI module. As I was searching through my databases' name column I noticed that the search would only match if the contents of the cell were exactly the same. Thus I set out to create a "loose" search option. Here's the jist of my error creating code: 

 my $name = $cgi->param("name"); 

 my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:my_db', 'user', 'pass')
          or die "Couldn't open database: $DBI::errstr";

my $sth = $dbh->prepare( "select * from my_db where name like ?" ) or 
+die "DBI prepare: $DBI::errstr";

$sth->execute( %name% ) or die "Couldn't execute statement: $DBI::errs
+tr";

[download]

If I want to return a 'strict' result with the above code I change the execution line to: 

$sth->execute( $name ) or die "Couldn't execute statement: $DBI::errst
+r";

[download]

and it works fine. As soon as I take the dollar sign off it stops working.



As far as I can tell my code follows what was laid out in the following code, which was posted to a perl users discussion group: 

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("
    SELECT blah FROM blah WHERE blah LIKE ?
");
$sth->execute('%foo%');

[download]
-z28

In reply to Using DBI to create 'loose' search options with LIKE and % by z28

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