SELECT rows that contain specific alphanumeric characters in MySQL

With this

OR column LIKE '%ab%'

As part of the WHERE clause, it's no surprise that abe and abg are selected.

Please permit me to also mention that queries LIKE '%something%' cannot make use of any indexes and are likely to be very slow on large tables. The fact that you have three of them in one query is only going to make it worse.

Use the below Query which will also use indexes on column column

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE 'ab%' AND column not LIKE 'abe%' 
AND column not LIKE 'abg%'

The Reason the indexes will be used in this case is the query is not using wildcard in the beginning of the string literal

Remove the last part of your query, it is telling it to select abg and abe. You have told it to select all items beginning with anything and ending with anything providing ab is in the middle.

Because column LIKE '%ab%' will get "abe" or "abg" If you want number after "ab", this is your query:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE '%abc%' OR column LIKE '%abd%' 
OR column LIKE '%ab0%' OR column LIKE '%ab1%' OR column LIKE '%ab2%' OR column LIKE '%ab3%' OR column LIKE '%ab4%' OR column LIKE '%ab5%' OR column LIKE '%ab6%' OR column LIKE '%ab7%' OR column LIKE '%ab8%' OR column LIKE '%ab9%'

Are you going to select column contain "abc" or "abd" or "ab" but not "abe"or "abg". For this case i don't think you can use LIKE. Try to use REGEXP. i think "ab[^g^e]?" should do the job for you.

SELECT name FROM table WHERE column REGEXP 'ab[^g^e]?';