Hope Somebody will help me about how I bind a parameter in mysqli when a multiple character wildcard needs to be next to the variable value. I found that it worked for me when creating a SQL statement, like this:

$sql = "SELECT item_title FROM item WHERE item_title LIKE '%$title%'";

However, I tried to bind the variable following the same pattern, and found that it failed. They used this code:

$sql = "SELECT item_title FROM item WHERE item_title LIKE '%?%'";

It raised this error:

Warning: mysqli_stmt_bind_param() [function.mysqli-stmt-bind-param]: Number of variables doesn't match number of parameters in prepared statement in program_name on line......

Can anybody tell me how fix this problem? Thank you.

You can bind only data literals not arbitrary query parts.
So, prepare your literal first

$var = "%$var%";
$sql = "SELECT item_title FROM item WHERE item_title LIKE ?";

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