Mysql - Check if String A contain String B or Substring B

Question

Is there any other way to perform this far from LIKE and REGEX , I am trying to check if string A contain string B or a little part of string B like example below string A = "United State of America" string B = "America"

String B should be checked if it exist in String A

Currently i have used REGEXP and LIKE but sometimes it give me false output, please check mycodes below and give any suggestion.

//Using REGEXP
$first_five = substr($data[0], -7, 7);
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM 'football' WHERE 'TEAMS' REGEXP '$first_five'");
//Using LIKE
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM 'football' WHERE 'TEAMS' LIKE '%$first_five%'");`

Any idea which query can perform same job like my above querys??????

Answer 1

mysql> SELECT INSTR('foobarbar', 'bar');
+---------------------------+
| INSTR('foobarbar', 'bar') |
+---------------------------+
|                         4 |
+---------------------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> SELECT INSTR('xbar', 'foobar');
+-------------------------+
| INSTR('xbar', 'foobar') |
+-------------------------+
|                       0 |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Answer 2

First of all: Notice about deprecation warning:

mysql_query Warning This extension was deprecated in PHP 5.5.0, and it was removed in PHP 7.0.0. Instead, the MySQLi or PDO_MySQL extension should be used.

In second place: You should to escape parameters (be careful, also deprecated)

$sql = "SELECT * FROM football WHERE TEAMS LIKE '%" . 
        mysql_real_escape_string($first_five) . 
        "%'";
$query = mysql_query($sql);