search keywords in string

alanita

Hello,
I’m not sure where to start with building a search function with following requirements:

I need to insert into a field “concepts” of a table “article” a string of keywords (keywords are defined by user and there are no restriction on choosing a keyword or number of keywords)
On search page I need to display a menu list (or checkboxes) with a list of all keywords from all rows, such that it will show all keywords from “concepts” filed defined by all users (I should discard double entries).
After pressing search/select button, user will get the list of articles for which those keywords were defined.

Basically I think of finding a function that takes a string and separate it into substrings according to the coma separator in that string and insert substrings into array. In this case those substrings would be the keywords I’m looking for. But, I don’t know where to start…

Please help if you have an idea how to approach this task.
Thank you,

lazzerous

ok, so in a field of a row of a table, you would have multiple keywords seperated by commas
you want to go through all entries in the table and pull all keywords and build an array out of that?

// create array to store all keywords
$keywords_main = array();

// get keywords from the table
$get_keys = mysql_query("select keywords from keywords_table");

while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($get_keys))
    {
    // explode list of keywords from this entry
    // into an array
    $keys = explode(",", $row[keywords]);

// add each entry to the main keywords array
for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($keys); $i++)
    {
    $keywords_main[] = $keys[$i];
    }
}

print_r($keywords_main);

alanita

Thank you for the reply.

Now, I'm trying display values of the array and it gives me "Array" word near each checkbox. How can I print values of each substring near each box instead?

I have this code:
$keywords_main = array();
$get_keys = mysql_query("select field_a from table_data");

while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($get_keys))
{
$keys = explode(" ", $row['field_a']);

for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($keys); $i++)
{
$keywords_main[] = $keys[$i];
echo " <input type=\"checkbox\" value=\"{$keywords_main}\" name=\"keywords_main[]\">{$keywords_main}</input><br />\n";
}

Thank you,

alanita

Problem solved.