Every SQL reference I can find says the "any single character" wildcard is the underscore (_), not the question mark (?). That simplifies things a bit, since the underscore is not a regex metacharacter. However, you still can't use Pattern.quote() for the reason given by mmyers. I've got another method here for escaping regexes when I might want to edit them afterward. With that out of the way, the like() method becomes pretty simple:
public static boolean like(final String str, final String expr)
{
String regex = quotemeta(expr);
regex = regex.replace("_", ".").replace("%", ".*?");
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex,
Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.DOTALL);
return p.matcher(str).matches();
}
public static String quotemeta(String s)
{
if (s == null)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("String cannot be null");
}
int len = s.length();
if (len == 0)
{
return "";
}
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(len * 2);
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
{
char c = s.charAt(i);
if ("[](){}.*+?$^|#\\".indexOf(c) != -1)
{
sb.append("\\");
}
sb.append(c);
}
return sb.toString();
}
If you really want to use ? for the wildcard, your best bet would be to remove it from the list of metacharacters in the quotemeta() method. Replacing its escaped form -- replace("\\?", ".") -- wouldn't be safe because there might be backslashes in the original expression.
And that brings us to the real problems: most SQL flavors seem to support character classes in the forms [a-z] and [^j-m] or [!j-m], and they all provide a way to escape wildcard characters. The latter is usually done by means of an ESCAPE keyword, which lets you define a different escape character every time. As you can imagine, this complicates things quite a bit. Converting to a regex is probably still the best option, but parsing the original expression will be much harder--in fact, the first thing you would have to do is formalize the syntax of the LIKE-like expressions themselves.