Pb searching a word in a string

Hi there! Here is the problem: Using OInformix, what is the trick to find a word in a string, but only THIS word. An example would be better : My fields are : "i flunked my exam" and "this is an example" If i want to find fields which contain the word 'exam', with the simple syntax *exam*, it will find the 2 fields, but I don't want the second one here. The difficulty here is to find the trick which works in every case, even if the searched word is at the beginning or at the end of the string, thinking that we could have other word separators than the space character (for example a comma character, the ':' character ...) and without using AND or OR clause in the select request (cauz the database is really huge, and I must optimize everywhere). Any help would be appreciated (even if you tell me that we can't do this). Thanx a lot ----------------------- Patrice pdemeyer@cri.univ-lr.fr