search feature

lorddraco98

my current project is a music reviews website.
I want to encorporate a search feature to the site.
I want users to be able to search out reviews, products, and anything else they might need on the site.
what's the general format of code and the functionallity around searching. I know vB does it through a DB, but honestly I'm clueless to how to write up code for a searching feature.
can anyone help?

ScubaKing22

Since I'm somewhat new still to PHP, I don't know if this would work or if there is any easier way. But one way I could think of is to do a MySQL query that would search for a user-given word/phrase. If any were found, (numrows > 0), you could loop through the results using a while or something. This probably wouldn't be advanced as it would find only exact matches, but you could give it a try. 🙂

lorddraco98

Originally posted by ScubaKing22
Since I'm somewhat new still to PHP, I don't know if this would work or if there is any easier way. But one way I could think of is to do a MySQL query that would search for a user-given word/phrase. If any were found, (numrows > 0), you could loop through the results using a while or something. This probably wouldn't be advanced as it would find only exact matches, but you could give it a try. 🙂

true, but there'd be no way to link to the page it was found on, or maybe i'm not seeing the whole picture

ScubaKing22

Well actually if there was a field in the table that contained the link, then you could say <a href="<? echo $link; ?>">LINK</a>. Again, you would have to enter all the table information for each page, which would probably be a hassle. Like I said I'm new, but that is what I think could potentially work.

batman

//you can change the like statements
$query_count = "select * from table where (description like '%$search%' or title like '%$search%')"; 
$result_count = mysql_query($query_count); 
$totalrows = mysql_num_rows($result_count);
if($totalrows > 0)
{
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query_count))
{
$var = $row['var'];
$var2 = $row['var2'];
$var3 = $row['var3'];
$var4 = $row['var4'];
}
//then echo the results how you want here
}

Hope that helps,

ScubaKing22

See there you go all you need is an expert like batman to actually write the code. But I guess my newbish ideas can work.

batman

lol, I'm far from being an expert. 🙂 All it's doing it searching for wildcards, finding anything that is close: hoola would bring back hoolahoop, hooladancer and others. Then it recieves all the variables associated to the matches found, then it prints results. 🙂 You will get, everyone started out somewhere. I'm sure even cgraz had to start out. 😉

ScubaKing22

I'm glad I responded because honestly I didn't know about that whole wildcard searching thing. Thanks for helping me not in my post lol. BTW when is this guy gonna respond?

lorddraco98

Originally posted by batman

//you can change the like statements
$query_count = "select * from table where (description like '%$search%' or title like '%$search%')"; 
$result_count = mysql_query($query_count); 
$totalrows = mysql_num_rows($result_count);
if($totalrows > 0)
{
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query_count))
{
$var = $row['var'];
$var2 = $row['var2'];
$var3 = $row['var3'];
$var4 = $row['var4'];
}
//then echo the results how you want here
}

Hope that helps, [/B][/QUOTE]

k that was my basic idea before just wasn't sure if that'd actually work.
thanks to both of you for the idea and the code!