MySql LIKE

Well, that's really strange ... I don't know what could possibly cause this behavior.

Technically, you could change the escape character and work-around the issue that way, but I'm guessing that if you're allowing '!' in usernames, you'd allow everything else as well, and in that case this wouldn't help.

Indeed, the problem is that I am scanning and gathering all users from an online game and I made a user search site.
The game lets people use every character available (even chinees and special chars). .

Every possible search works unless the string starts with '!'
I don't know what I can do to fix this, that is why I asked here.