recursion appropriate in this situation

chucklarge

Hello,
I have a mysql db with 2 tables, searchwords and articles. searchwords is filled with words used to search the articles tables. I want to take one word from searchwords, search for that word in articles and return the article it appears in, and delete that word from the searchwords table. if that word doesn't exist in the article, it is deleted and the next searchword is used. If there are no words in searchwords, then i want to return a random article.

I have this function

	function returnArticle()
	{		
		$searchwordQuery = mysql_query("SELECT searchword FROM searchwords LIMIT 1") or die (mysql_error());

	if( mysql_num_rows($searchwordQuery) ) 
	{	
		$searchwordRow	= mysql_fetch_assoc($searchwordQuery);
		$searchword 		=	$searchwordRow['searchword'];

		$articleQuery = mysql_query("SELECT title, description, article_link FROM rss_cache WHERE description REGEXP '.*$searchword' LIMIT 1") or die (mysql_error());

		// now delete returned searchword from searchwords table
		mysql_query("DELETE FROM searchwords LIMIT 1 ");

		// if search returns nothing, call self  recursivly
		if(	!mysql_num_rows($articleQuery) )	returnArticle();

		$article = mysql_fetch_assoc($articleQuery);
	}
	else
	// the searchwords table is empty, return random article
	{	$articleQuery = mysql_query("SELECT title, description, article_link FROM rss_cache ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1") or die (mysql_error());
		$article = mysql_fetch_assoc($articleQuery);
	}


	$_xml ="<?xml version=\"1.0\" ?><rss><article><header>".$article["title"]."</header><body>".$article["description"]."</body><link>".$article["article_link"]."</link></article></rss>"; 
	return $_xml;

}

all seems to work ok except if there are searchwords that don't exist in the articles. when that happens, nothing is returned, so maybe the recursion is not working as i expect it to.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Chuck

Drakla

There's no need for recursion in that function at all. You could just select all searchwords with the one query - if no db rows do your random thing, if there are rows then just iterate through them and perform the article search and break out if you do find anything, or set a 'found' flag which you could then check to see if you still need to return a random article.