[Resolved] Searching without Limits (or Commas!)

KITTfan2K

Hey All....

I've got this database of songs that I have to maintain, and one of the problems that people have complained to me about is that if they search, they have to get all the punctuation (commas, semicolons, full stops, and, most annoyingly, new lines) right, otherwise the search will come up blank.

What I need to do is to search the database for the words entered, as follows:

Search String: "hello welcome to my home"
Matches: "hello, welcome. (/r/n) to my Home"

Notice the new line in the match string. That is especially important to me, because some songs are laid out stupidly, with 2 words on the first line and 5 on the second, where you would expect all 7 on the first.

Yell at me if this doesn't make sense!

Andrew.

Pig

MATCH might do what you want.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Search.html

KITTfan2K

Originally posted by Pig
MATCH might do what you want.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Search.html

Thanks, Pig. I tried the match thing, but it came back with no results.

I may have done something wrong and generated an error that the script assumed meant no results...

Would it help if I posted the code that I'm using to search?

Andrew.

Pig

that'd be a good idea.

KITTfan2K

The code gets a bit wide in places, so I've linked to it: http://www.strangelyrandom.com/code.php?execute=no&showall=yes

I think that I commented the place where I want to use a match command.

Edit: On the same computer, I'm using similar code to the following:

session_start()

if ($_SESSION['This'] != "That")
 {
  // Do something.
  $_SESSION['This'] = "That";
 }
// So, in theory, it should only do it the first time the page is run, but it does it every time. I put in code to to check if it came up with the session variable in the first half of the page, but it didn't. Have I missed something stupid, or is my PHP configuration not allowing sessions somehow?

Andrew.

Pig

Well if you want me to help you with MATCH, you need to show how you are implementing it. You've already determined that LIKE is not working for you. Show me how you are doing it with MATCH.

Regarding the sessions, that is correct. You must also make sure nothing else touches the variable.

KITTfan2K

The query I'm using for match is

"SELECT `Index`, `Title`, `FirstLine`, `SecondLine`
FROM `".$MySQL['Table']."`
WHERE MATCH (`Song`) AGAINST (".$SearchText.")";

Sorry bout that.

Andrew.

Pig

You have to enclose your search string in quotes. Try:
"SELECT Index, Title, FirstLine, SecondLine
FROM ".$MySQL['Table']."
WHERE MATCH (Song) AGAINST ('".$SearchText."')";

KITTfan2K

It's not displaying an error, so I know that it's getting as far as not finding any results, if that makes sense.

It's just saying that there was no results found, even when I search for something that's going to be in every song (like a space, or a comma or full stop!)

I'm mystified. And confused.

Andrew.

Pig

Depending on how you're set up, you probably cannot search for strings less 4 chars long. Run your query directly in the database rather than in your script and see what you get.