MySQL 8 issues with Regex

We had a server which updated their MySQL version to 8, which ended up breaking a few things on the site. It's a shop which uses variants, and the main issue was that users couldn't add products with variants.

In MySQL 8 the way regexp work have changed and here is a brief outline one the changes that affect perch

Quote

The Spencer library supports word-beginning and word-end boundary markers ([[:<:]] and [[:>:]] notation). ICU does not. For ICU, you can use \b to match word boundaries; double the backslash because MySQL interprets it as the escape character within strings.

So if you are using perch shop or any regex filters in your collections or perch_content_custom functions then you'll need to update [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] to \\\\b.

As you might not be locally developing on MySQL 8 what I did was replace [[:<:]] with a global BOUNDARY_START and [[:>:]] with BOUNDARY_END then in your local config you can set these to what you need without needing it go backwards and forwards