As the title states, the caret (^) is not used as an exponent in MySQL. I’m not certain what exactly it does (and couldn’t find any documentation after a quick search), and would love to find out what its purpose is.
I ran into this problem today when I noticed that MySQL’s math results (using ^) didn’t match my own. After triple checking my own math, I added lots of parens and still got nowhere, so I checked the Operator Precedence and sure enough it listed the caret (^) as falling between “, /, DIV, %, MOD” and “- (unary minus), ~ (unary bit inversion)”. This made me think that surely I have a typo in my code somewhere since if the operator is mentioned it should be supported. WRONG.*
Convinced that something had gone horribly awry I began to look through the other math function available and switched to using POW and SQRT which instantly remedied the problem.
After getting my equations working I began to try to find more information on the symbol that caused me so much frustration. Alas, as mentioned above, I could find no specific information, other than some hints that it might be used for RegEx or as XOR, though after running the query below, I remain unconvinced.
SELECT 1^0, 1^1, 1^2, 1^3, 1^4, 1^5, TRUE^FALSE, TRUE^TRUE, FALSE^FALSE, FALSE^TRUE
1^0 <th>1^1
<th>1^2
<th>1^3
<th>1^4
<th>1^5
<th>TRUE^FALSE
<th>TRUE^TRUE
<th>FALSE^FALSE
<th>FALSE^TRUE
1 <td> </td> <td>3
<td>2
<td>5
<td>4
<td>1
<td> </td> <td> </td> <td>1