search OR search OR search grrr!

[anthill]

Hi,

With the help of some code from the forum and a little adjustment here and there I created a search script that supports multiple words from a database. That was the hard part, now the easy part of querying the database is where it all goes downhill 🙁

here is the code:

<?

// my search string was 'please read as this contains'

$searchwords = $HTTP_POST_VARS['search'];

$db = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
mysql_select_db("database",$db);

$words = split(" +",addslashes($searchwords));
$query = "SELECT * FROM search WHERE ";
$once=0;
$number = count($words);
$try = $number - 1;
foreach($words as $word)
     {
        $query.= " info LIKE '%$word%'";
        if ($once < $try)
        $query.= " OR";
        if ($once == $try)
        $query.= "";
        $once++;
     }

echo $query;

// the query looks something like SELECT * FROM search WHERE info LIKE '%please%' OR info LIKE '%read%' OR info LIKE '%as%' OR info LIKE '%this%' OR info LIKE '%contains%'

$sql = mysql_query($query,$db);
$array = mysql_fetch_array($sql);

$result = $array['output'];

echo $result;

?>

I keep getting an error that says:

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource

Anyone help?

Thanks

Ant

[planetsim]

use mysql_error() may give a more detailed error statement

[khayll]

in such cases it is useful to echo the query and copy paste it into the sql command line

this way you can see more detailed error messages regarding the query itself

[-__Juztin__-]

Can you verify that you query is a valid SQL statement by testing the page & copying the Query printed out by your "echo($query);" statement into your MySQL server directly and running it with a valid affected rows returned?

IF that doesnt check out then check the syntax of the query string you copied into the MySQL server...
IF that checks out, in your code itself, try changing the latter portion to look like this:

$sql = mysql_query($query,$db);
$array = mysql_num_rows($sql);

//$result = $array['output'];
echo($array." affected rows");
echo($array);

Now is the result returned like 1 or greater and does that correlate to the numer of returns reported by running the string contained within the $query variable ealier?