hello everyone i am wondering if Mysql supports
range operator and negation character in wildcards.

In my talbe i have a column called lastname:
records in lastname are: hansen, svendson, petterson and peter.

1. I wrote a query try to find out last name start with letter 'h', 's' or 'p'
followed by any characters.

the result retured an empty set. Seems to me Mysql doesn't support range
operator []

2. I want to find out that entry that doesn't start with letter 't'
the result also returned a empty set.

Please give me some advises on how to make wildcards works in these 2 cases.

You are trying to use regular expressions here. The syntax for that is different (because it's not standard SQL). See the manual:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/regexp.html

and this is how it's done using the regular expressions but it's better to do it using like though as this is easier to read:

Note :

• the ^ starts the comparison at the beginning of the line.
• the ^ after the [ means do not match against these characters.
• the % doesn't have any special meanings with rlike.
• you could put .* instead of % which means the same thing for rlike but it's not necessary.
• the keyword regexp does the same as rlike.

Mike