In regular expressions you can use the zero-width pattern \b to match the beginning or end of a word:

note.title =~ /\bfoo\b/

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Unfortunately \b is not available in MySQL. You can use [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] to match the beginning and end of a word instead:

SELECT * FROM notes WHERE title REGEXP "[[:<:]]foo[[:>:]]"

These markers are unique to MySQL and not available in Ruby regular expressions.