Searching the database

Anon

Hi everyone,

I am new to MySQL and php and I just wondered if anyone can help me out a little. I am creating a database to store my photo's and a few bits of information as well. At the moment I have the following query for searching:

mysql_query("SELECT * from photo WHERE 1 and (place LIKE '$search') OR (type LIKE '$search') OR (airline LIKE '$search') OR (reg LIKE '$search') OR (date LIKE '$search') OR (notes LIKE '$search')");

which as the experts among you will realise it returns an answer from my sql when one of the the field values = the search variable.

So at the moment if somebody typed "Britannia Airways AB" it would come out true, but if somebody typed in just "Britannia" it would not be recognised. Can somebody let me know how I can get a true response for this search.

Hope I have explained it OK,
Thanks in advance,

Danny Hill

sepodati

change your LIKEs to match this:

reg LIKE '%$search%'

The %s are wildcard characters. That way you can match $search anywhere within reg, instead of matching the whole thing.

---John Holmes...

Anon

Thanks a lot for that, very simple answer in the end.

Could you please help with another problem. Now the code searches all fields and returns all data where the variable is contained in one field. What I would like now is say someone searches Lauda Air (in field airline) 737 (in field type) then it would return negative because thery are in seperate fields and no one field contains Lauda Air 737. How do I now get this to result in positive answers.

(the code I am using is in the first post)

hope you all understand my problem,

Regards,

Danny

sepodati

If you're going to get into complex searching, you'll want to search the net for other ways to do it, probably by indexing your site in a file or database, and then searching on that. I belive PHPbuilder and Devshed.com have articles on making your site searchable.

What you want will probably take multiple queries, or a very login query where you search each field for each word, then analyze the results. I'd probably break up the search text into individual words. Query the database and get the ID#s of each record that matches the single word. repeat for each word. then, filter out the id#s that are in the results for each word.

See how complex it gets? There are much better methods, do some searching...

---John Holmes...