unordered word search

[correo@ironcito.com]

Hello,

I've built a search engine that queries a MySQL database. However,
if I enter "foo bar", the engine will search for that phrase exactly,
and will not find "bar foo" nor "foo something bar". How do you
separate words so that the engine finds them individually? I'm thinking
something like

$tokenized = strtok($query, " ")
mysql_query(" SELECT ... FROM ...
while(...){ WHERE ...}
")

but I just can't figure it out. Any help is much appreciated. Many
thanks in advance.

Diego

[Erwin Moller]

Re: unordered word search

correo@ironcito .com wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello,
>
> I've built a search engine that queries a MySQL database. However,
> if I enter "foo bar", the engine will search for that phrase exactly,
> and will not find "bar foo" nor "foo something bar". How do you
> separate words so that the engine finds them individually? I'm thinking
> something like
>
> $tokenized = strtok($query, " ")
> mysql_query(" SELECT ... FROM ...
> while(...){ WHERE ...}
> ")
>
> but I just can't figure it out. Any help is much appreciated. Many
> thanks in advance.
>
> Diego[/color]

Hi,

Suppose you have a table with firstname and lastname and etc. etc., and you
want to search firstname.
(I wrote an example in clear steps, so you see what happens. You can code it
a lot more dense if you prefer that.)


$searchwords = "foo bar whatever etc";
$ARRsearch = explode(" ",$searchwords) ;

$SQL = "SELECT firstname, lastname, ..... FROM tblYouKnow WHERE (";

$SQL_wordsearch = array();

foreach($ARRsea rch as $oneWord){
$SQL_wordsearch[] = "(firstname LIKE '%".$oneWord."% ')";
}

// add the pieces to SQL, use " OR " as 'glue':
$SQL .= implode(" OR ",$SQL_wordsear ch);
$SQL .= ");";

echo $SQL;

// Now execute the SQL the way you are used to.

Good luck.

Regards,
Erwin Moller

PS, I am using the LIKE with %. I am unsure if that is supported like that
in mysql because I never use mysql. Maybe you need different syntax, but
that is just SQL syntax, you'll figure that out.

[iuz]

Re: unordered word search

correo@ironcito .com wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello,
>
> I've built a search engine that queries a MySQL database. However,
> if I enter "foo bar", the engine will search for that phrase exactly,
> and will not find "bar foo" nor "foo something bar". How do you
> separate words so that the engine finds them individually? I'm thinking
> something like
>
> $tokenized = strtok($query, " ")
> mysql_query(" SELECT ... FROM ...
> while(...){ WHERE ...}
> ")
>
> but I just can't figure it out. Any help is much appreciated. Many
> thanks in advance.
>
> Diego[/color]

if you wnat to search these words in this order you can simply do something
like this..
$string = "word0 word1 word2 word3 word4 ";
$words = '%' . preg_replace('/ +/', '%', trim($string)) . '%';
$words = mysql_escape_st ring($words);
echo "SELECT * FROM table WHERE nn LIKE '$words'";

--

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