Formatting Search Results

Anon

I have a script that searches a single text field in MySQL. I would like to format the results Google-like, with the search word(s) surrounding with about ten words on either side.

Example: If I was to search for the word 'happiness', the script might return:

...in the pursuit of happiness, they went...and life is full of unhappiness and there is nothing...they said happiness to you and all your family...

I already have it highlighting the correct words, I just want it to find those words so they all show in the results.

Anon

Use a regular expression. (regex) It'd be something like:
$match='/.{0,20}[$word1|$word2|$word3].{0,20}/';

Try preg_match or maybe preg_match_all against the matches, then parse thru the results.

If you don't know about regex, get "Learning Perl" by O'Reilly - the chapter there on regular expressions is the best explanation I've ever seen anywhere.

-Ben

factory21

Rudy Greene wrote:

I already have it highlighting the correct words, I just want it to find those words so they all show in the results.

How are you highlighting the correct words if you can't FIND the words in the first place?

Or are you saying that you know how to highlight a span of text from the database, but you don't know how to get the results from the database in the first place?
If that's the case, you can do LIKE '%wordtofind%' in the WHERE clause of your SQL statement.

Anon

I can highlight the words correctly, however the MySQL text field that stores the data is too large to show on the screen. I would like to extract the portions of the text where the search word(s) is located.

What I mean by "Google-like" is that Google returns a brief description of a page instead of the entire text in their search results. The description is generated by extracting portions of the text from the page.

Anon

It's not easy - You can do it using regular expressions as I've mentioned above. The tricky part is that you have to dynamically generate the matching expression - alone that could easily turn into quite a few lines of code, since you have to define the words, separate them out, ensure that all characters that mean something are escaped, etc. (addslashes() wouldn't do it, unfortunately)

If you don't understand regex, go get the camel book - O'Reilly's Perl book - and read chapter 7: "Regular Expressions". This is far and away the best explanation of regex I've ever seen.

If it's worth doing, it's worth spending $15 and getting this book!

-Ben

Anon

It would seem that someone has already written something like this.