I'm in section 3.3.4.7 of the tutorial for MySQL right now, slowly plowing through learning how to make, update, and query a database. In the section I am currently in I have however encountered some problems in understanding and was wondering if anyone could help me better understand this section or point me to a website that discusses it. Basically, I'm okay with "Pattern Matching" except for the . and * parts. For example, when I write the following expression:
select * from pet where name regexp "[.....]";
I get no sets returned. This is strange, b/c shouldn't my command have said "Looking for anything, five times." It is somewhat redundant I suppose and could as well have been stated "[.]", but in either case, why is it returning nothing? There are eight records in the set, all of which have values under name. The weirdest thing is when I change the form of the expression it works, e.g.:
select * from pet where name regexp ".....";
  Thanks for any help you may be able to give.
Confused,
David.