Formerly used to escape strings before searching the DB. It was poorly documented and never worked as described.

• wpdb::esc_like()

$text string Required

The text to be escaped.

string text, safe for inclusion in LIKE query.

File: wp-includes/deprecated.php. View all references

function like_escape($text) {
	_deprecated_function( __FUNCTION__, '4.0.0', 'wpdb::esc_like()' );
	return str_replace( array( "%", "_" ), array( "\\%", "\\_" ), $text );
}