Help with MySQL search queries.

Anon

I'm making a search engine for my site and I'm using this sort of query:

SELECT * FROM $tbl WHERE LOWER(content) LIKE '% $s[$index] %')

The $s[$index] value is a single word.

I want MySQL to find matches that have complete words, not parts of words. Like if I search for "paint shop PRO", I don't want it to find pages with "PROfessional" written in them, so I'm using LIKE '% $s[$index] %' as part of my query (notice the spaces). This works in most cases to find a complete word, but lets say someone searches for "bear" and I have the word bear in a page, but it's writte in the page like this:

It was the bear.

It won't find that page because of the period. Remember, the query was looking for [space]$word[space], and not [space]$word[period].

I hope you understand what I mean. Hopefully someone can take sometime to read this and help. Thanks a lot.

tomhath

mysql can do regular expression searches. See what the manual says about using 'RLIKE' or 'REGEXP' in place of 'LIKE'

Anon

What kind of query would I need, then? I'm not very good with regular expressions at all 🙁

Thanks.

[deleted]

Forget regular expressions, they are way too slow in MySQL.

Read the phpbuilder article called 'slapping together a searchengine'. That is much more effective and a lot faster.

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?