Make a little search engine...

[Anon]

I'm going to make a little search engine for a database of movie titles.

What I would like to do, is a search on a single MySQL table field, the title; users should be able to fill up a text form where they could type one word of the title, more words or all the title.

I think I can use the explode function to take each piece of the string to compare with titles, but... before do this I think you have some better suggestions or pieces of codeot http links ...

Thank you fro your help once more!

Fabio

[Anon]

The best way of doing this depends on what your visitor expects. Give your visitor a pair of radio buttons so they can select whether they want to search for an exact phrase or for any movie titles containing any of the words. Then do one of the following:

(assuming the field in your form is called $searchwords)

Exact Phrase:
$sqlquery = "SELECT * FROM MOVIES WHERE TITLE LIKE '%$searchwords%'"

Any Words:
$searchwords = trim($searchwords)
$searchwords = str_replace(" ", "%' OR TITLE LIKE '%", searchphrase)
$sqlquery = "SELECT * FROM MOVIES WHERE (TITLE LIKE '%$searchwords%'"

This code is just off the top of my head and hasn't been checked, you will probably need to clean it up and do some extra tidying up of $searchwords - figuring out how to handle quotation marks etc. But this should be a good start.

Jack