Soundex

[cheald]

I'm writing a search engine for a mysql database that will implement soundex() for fuzzy searches. Here's my problem. Say I have a textfield that contains the following:

"Apples, oranges, bananas, and other stuff"

and I want to successfully match "bannannas" to this field. The soundex doesn't return true, because it's comparing soundex("Apples, oranges, bananas, and other stuff") to soundex("bannannas"), which obviously returns false. How to extract the substrings so that I can perform a soundex on them? will I simply have to parse the string for every possible string of every length up to strlen(search_string) + X, or is there a more efficient way?

Thanks

Chris

[neuromancer]

Have you looked into using the split function?

@each=split("[, ]",$string); or something like that.

Split on any character that might be a seperator, then loop through each element

[cheald]

Yes, I thought about that. Problem is, I'm trying to do this all in a mysql SELECT statement. Doesn't work too well.

I finally added a new column to my table that stores the soundex results of each word. Then, I match the soundex against that list. Works quite nicely.

Now I just have to build in alternate starting characters and plurals...

[Anon]

Why not build a query with each of the results from the array?

SELECT x,... FROM t WHERE SOUNDEX(c) IN (SOUNDEX('element 1'),SOUNDEX('element 2'),SOUNDEX('element 3'),...)