Search Database- problem with special characters

[xen01]

Greetings,

Im working on a small project that displays store when a user search it at a search toolbar.

If Desired Restaurant name is: Nino's Bathhouse

and User enters: nin or nino's
Nino's restaurant appears

but if User enters: ninos
Nothing appears

on an sql level code
select * from store where name like '%$search_field%' order by name;

what modifications should i make so that search_field = ninos get the result = Nino's Bathhouse?

Thank you.
JC.

[TheDefender]

I don't think MySQL has a function like that, but you can maybe try something like stripping off the s or something before doing the search...

$search_field = "Ninos";
If(substr($search_field, -1) == "s") {
$search_field_washed = substr($search_field, 0, (strlen($search_field)-1));
} else {
$search_field_washed = $search_field;
}
echo $search_field_washed;

Then use the washed variable ($search_field_washed) in your query.

select * from store where name like '%$search_field_washed%' OR name like '%$search_field%' order by name;

The trouble with this method is if the search string is something like "harrass" or "mess", because they would be truncated too, but it might be a fair trade-off. That's for you to decide. Also, it wouldn't help if a restaurant was called "D'Angelos" and the user inputted "Dangelos" or "Dangelo's".