Searching a database

son_of_yoda

Hi,

I am trying to set up a database for users to search for topics by using a form text box and then submitting. This value would then return several results each of which contains further information. How would I go about passing data across a page to provide a view of the further information?

Can anyone give me some advice on how this would be acheived, ie form settings and php script to query the database with the values passed to it via the form.

use the force

Son of Yoda

TalonFinsky

What I personally would do is do a query something like:

$query = "select * from db where keywords_table like %".$searchterm;

$grabinfo = mysql_query($query);
$result_num = mysql_num_rows($grabinfo);
$grabinfo = mysql_fetch_array($grabinfo);

And then a for loop to list all the different info in each row, using array elements such as $grabinfo["tablename1"] etc.

Using the above code, you would be able to check the $result_num variable to run the for loop only for as many results as you receive on your search. Remember if the column you are reading from is going to be using special chars (such as \ and ' ) you will want to do a stripslashes();.

I hope that's what you meant, but if not, or if you need more help, let me know.

ecg

hi there...
Got the
select * from $filename where $data like %txtstring% working but need to

1) lowercase it all first...
2) search for words... ie if txtstring = 'firstname lastname' I can compare both the first and last name against data.

1) currently my database contains data as entered by the user... so 'Beth' is a different entry to 'beth'. If a user enters 'beth' as the txtstring I want to bring back both 'Beth' and 'beth...
any ideas?

2) is more of a wishlist.. but I'd like to be able to say "you entered 'beth lastname' but the closest matches are 'beth abbott', 'beth jones' and 'beth white'.
any hints or pointers?

Thanks :-)
Beth

ecg

Found the answer to part 2) of my Q.... http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10220178&highlight=search+database

which works well...
but part 1?

can I

$SearchString = strtolower($SearchString);
$sql = "SELECT * from FILENAME where strtolower(COLUMNNAME) like '%$SearchString%'";

any better ideas?

Thanks

ecg

With Postgresql the line is:

$sql ="SELECT * from filename where [I]lower[/I]('columnname')  like '%SearchString%'

I was close....