Reg Exp issue

Hello, I am trying to find a string in another string with mysql. Normally, this would work. select 'foo' REGEXP ('foo'); And that would simply return 1, since it found it. But, my strings are more complicated than that. One good random example is something like this..Ya i know, its wierd but go with me on this. ok/2.0 (hah 3.0; BAM oh 5.1; .hi CLR 1.0.4725) so you would do a select like.. select 'ok/2.0 (hah 3.0; BAM oh 5.1; .hi CLR 1.0.4725)' REGEXP ('ok/2.0 (hah 3.0; BAM oh 5.1; .hi CLR 1.0.4725)'); That of course doesnt work. All of the () 's, and /'s, and .'s, mess it all up. And suggestion on what to do? any function to convert all of the special regexp characters ()[];.^*$ etc to work correctly? Thank You, Taylor York