LIKE search bringing up all records

Colm_Osiris

I'm doing a search on one or both of two fields, and I'd like to do a LIKE search, but all that happens is all the records in the database are selected, which is not the intended result!

The SELECTs look like this:

Company only:

$query="SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE company LIKE '".$search_company."%' ORDER BY company ASC";

Classification only:

$query="SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE classification LIKE '".$search_classification."%' ORDER BY company ASC";

Both:

$query="SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE company LIKE '".$search_company."%' or
classification LIKE '".$search_classification."%' ORDER BY company ASC";

What am I doing wrong, please?

Installer

Do you get an error message, such as "Notice: Undefined variable..."? Are "$search_company" and "$search_classification" supposed to be passed via post or get or session, but "register_globals" is turned off? What happens if you put a literal value into your query?

Colm_Osiris

No, no error message.

They're both POST and GET. Not sure what 'global_variables' is, I'm afraid.

When I do the following query in PHPMyAdmin, I get 3 records, which is as it should be:

SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE (company LIKE 'asd%') OR (classification LIKE 'des%') ORDER BY company ASC

Would it help if I posted the whole PHP document?

Pieman86

Try printing out $query to see if PHP's sending the right SQL statement through to the database (it sounds like it isn't).

When Register Globals is turned on, GET and POST variables are automatically made available, so (for example) if someone submits something through a form element called "search_company", then that text is available in "$search_company" without you having to do anything. Otherwise, you have to use $_REQUEST['search_company'] to fetch it manually.

Installer

Echo out your variables to see if they're being filled. It sounds like a register_globals problem to me.

You don't have to use $REQUEST. Better to use the specific array, i.e. $POST or $_GET.

Edit: If "echo $search_company" shows the expected value, then the problem is not with register_globals. If it doesn't, then it is, and it also means you have error_reporting turned off, which doesn't make much sense when you're having troubles.

fibonacci

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