Bad request error on use of special characters

I want to filter a field of type mediumtext for the equal sign. But that throws a 400 Bad Request error. I get the same result when I filter for the greater-than or smaller-than sign. I guess because these symbols conflict with the SQL comparison operators.
I am making a request to MySQL Maria database via the dreamfactory’s API.

I tried escaping the equal sign with a backslash, but it did not work.

What can I do now?

Details:
Request URL: …/mytablename?fields=content&filter=content%20like%20%25%3D%25
Response Body:
{
“error”: {
“code”: 400,
“context”: null,
“message”: “Invalid or unparsable field in filter request: ‘content like %’”,
“status_code”: 400
}
}