Query help - can't figure this out!

Aurasia

I'm trying to use a search to grab data from different fields in my database. So say someone searched for "Harry Potter" - that result needs to come up but so does JK Rowling ... and here's my next question ... how do I get results to come back if they're close to what was submitted. Like J.K Rowling or JRR tolkien as well as J.R.R Tolkien?

$query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM data_array WHERE type OR author OR subject1 OR subject2 ='%s'", mysql_real_escape_string($searchtopic));

A query can definitely do this, right? What am I missing here?

mrhappiness

WHERE
  type = '%s'
  OR author = '%s'

Aurasia

Mr. Happiness,
That seemed to work - I reworked my code a bit and had to do this:

$query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM data_array WHERE type ='%s' OR author ='%s' OR subject1 ='%s' OR subject2 ='%s'", mysql_real_escape_string($searchtopic), mysql_real_escape_string($searchtopic), mysql_real_escape_string($searchtopic), mysql_real_escape_string($searchtopic));

Because the sprintf function wants a string variable for each '%s' ... no big deal - I guess ...

But here's the next problem. In the fields subject1 and subject two there are a series of subjects presently separated by commas so a book might look like this

subject1
fantasy, adventure, young adult
subject2
scorcery, magic, wizard, witch

How do I get the search to accept only 1 of these. The way it presently works, the entire subject1 or subject2 field has to be exact for the search to pull back that row as a result. Any ideas?