Question
I've been instructed "not to bother with LIKE" and use ~ instead. What is
wrong with LIKE and how is ~ different?
Does ~ have a name in this context or do people say "use the tilde
operator"?
Answer
~ is the regular expression operator, and has the capabilities implied by
that. You can specify a full range of regular expression wildcards and
quantifiers; see [the
documentation](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/functions-
matching.html#FUNCTIONS-POSIX-REGEXP) for details. It is certainly more
powerful than LIKE, and should be used when that power is needed, but they
serve different purposes.
