Looped Matching

fuji_606

I'm having a problem with selecing some SQL records and going through them to find matches. The basic idea is that theres an array called keywords which has all the user keywords, and I select each SQL row, and try and match it's keywords values with each keyword in the array (using two while loops), which looked like this (in psedocode form);

while there is a record to fetch

count1 is 0
while count1 <= number of keywords

count2 is 0
while count2 <= number f keywords
if preg_match(user keyword, record keywords) then
matches++
else
do nothing

count2++
endwhile

count1++
endwhile

endwhile

The offending article is the preg_match function, which has the following syntax;

if (preg_match($keywords[$count2], $data[keywords])) {
$matches++;
}
else {
}

It says something about the delimiter not being allowed to be alphanumeric or backslash, and I've no idea what that means, or even what a delimiter IS. Can anyone help? ;X

devinemke

i think you might want to re-examine your whole approach to this. why pull out all the data from the db, why not just pull out records that match the keywords. here's a VERY simplified example (assuming the keywords are coming in from user input from a form with each word separated by a space):

$keywords = str_replace (' ', ',', $_POST['keywords']);
$result = mysql_query ('SELECT * FROM table WHERE field IN(' . $keywords . ')');
echo 'there are ' . mysql_num_rows ($result) . ' records matching your keywords<br><br>';
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc ($result))
{
// display contents of each row
}

fuji_606

It's not coming from a form, it selects the keywords from a user info table using their username which is stored in a cookie when they login. I'll try using that IN ($var) function in the My-SQL code though, I didn't know that kind of thing could be done - or at least, I didn't know how to get records that matched a given var without doing it via PHP in a more lengthy way. Thanks.