Can’t get LIKE to work with wp_query [closed]

When you set up the meta_query value like:

'value' => "'" . $city . "'",

it gets translated to LIKE '%\'ondon\'%' in the final SQL query, which matches things like L'ondon' or L'ondon'er but not London.

But you actually want it to be like: LIKE '%ondon%' – so you should do:

'value' => $city,

EDIT

Sorry, I haven’t noticed that this actually is Job Manager plugin related and the job_listing_region is a taxonomy. In that case you should try to do something like:

// get taxonomy id's with names matching the query string $city
$foo_terms = get_terms( 'job_listing_region', array('name__like' => $city) );
$term_ids = [];
if ($foo_terms) {
    foreach ($foo_terms as $foo_term) {
        $term_ids[] = $foo_term->term_id;
    }
}

// get jobs_listing entries matching retrieved id's
$args = array(
            'post_type' => 'job_listing',
            'post_status'      => 'publish',
            'posts_per_page' => -1,
            'tax_query' => array(
                 array(
                     'taxonomy' => 'job_listing_region',
                     'field'    => 'term_id',
                     'terms' => $term_ids,
                     'operator' => 'IN'
                 )
            )
);