Arrays in mySQL

mr-nathan

Hi,

I can't seem to get my head around this one!!

I've split a string of data in to its selected components. I now want search the database for each components but I'm not sure how the query should done as the amount of components can very.

That means doing "$split[0] OR $split[1] OR $split[2]" won't really work as the there may not enough vars or even too many.

The method so far is:

$articleid = mysql_fetch_row($result);
$split = explode(";", $articleid[4]);

for ($acount = 0; $acount <= count($split); $acount++)
{
echo "$acount - $split[$acount]<br>";
}

$result = mysql_db_query("mdb0020",
"SELECT * FROM articles
WHERE relation LIKE $split[0] OR $split[1]???
");

Any help will be great.

Nathan.

[deleted]

A few notes:

LIKE is very slow. Don't use it if you don't need a wildcard search.
Don't use arrays inside double quotes.
Quote all strings that you want to use in a query using SINGLE quotes.

Having said that, the solution to your problem is quite simple;
Add as many OR's as you need depending on the number of elements in the array.

A simple way:

$sQuery = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE 1=0";
for ($t=0;$t<count($array);$t++)
{
$sQuery .=" OR field='".$array[$t]."' ";
};

BTW you can do this much 'smarter' using 'implode', but this demostrates the point I'm trying to make better.

mr-nathan

Thanks for your help, just our of interest though what is the "inplode()" method of this?

[deleted]

Implode is the reverse of explode.
It lets you take an array and form a single string oout of all the elements by joining the elementes together.
You can define a seperate string taht should be placed inbetween each element, like this:

$array = array(1,2,3,4);
echo implode(',',$array);

will output:
1,2,3,4

With a little clever thinking you can make the implode create a list of OR statements, because the text between each of the vars is the same for each OR statement, something like:

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE field=value OR field=othervalue OR field=anothervalue

The 'OR field=' is repeated between all values.

Anon

I see what you mean, thanks

Nathan.