Help with REGEXP in mySQL WHERE

[James Wilson]

I have a large mySQL Db table that contain cemetery burial information. One field contains military information about service branch and campaigns (e.g., Korea, Vietnam).

Using a string search value with %...% works fine for most of the campaigns. But, searching for %World War I% also selects the records containing 'World War II'. Thus, I changed the search to use a REGEXP '\bWorld War I\b' but this returns zero records.

This is the code...

SELECT * FROM memorials
LEFT JOIN cemeteries ON cem_id = per_cemid
WHERE per_cemid = 134
AND (per_mil_inscription REGEXP '\bWorld War I\b'
OR per_mil_notes REGEXP '\bWorld War I\b')

The code doesn't work in my PHP code and doesn't work in a cPanel SQL query.

What am I doing wrong?

TIA for any assistance

--
James A Wilson
[e-mail]