[RESOLVED] selecting 50 chars around a keyword

ade1982

Hi gang,

I have written a basic search engine that prints out a description field in it's entirety (the field is a text area),

so the mysql query is literally

description LIKE %$description%

and for the entry BLAH BLAH, it prints out the whole of the "description" field in the DB.

What I actually want it to do is print out, say, 50 characters either side of the actual "BLAH BLAH", with the entry "BLAH BLAH" being bolded

Can it be done?

Thanking you!

Adrian

bretticus

Anything is possible right?

I haven't ever done this but a few ideas pop out of my head:

You could return the full description from the database as you are currently doing and use some string functions to give you the data you want. The following is some quick code I tried out real quick in a debugger (this could be condensed to one line I'm sure but for illustrative purposes, I'm showing the code in its entirety:

$searched = "come";
$string = "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country";
$width = 10;
$point = strpos($string,$searched);
echo $point;
echo "\n";
$start = $point-$width;
$length = strlen($searched)+$width*2;
echo $start;
echo "\n";
echo $length;
echo "\n";
echo substr($string, $start, $length);

bretticus

well, I just noticed you said BOLD but the same principles coudl be used (ie. from the text returned, you could use a str_replace for example.)

ade1982

Spot on!

Thank you so much

blckspder

I would like to do something similar... I have a control panel for my website where you can enter up to 10 keywords and a meta description for it as well as upload the page all from this form..... Then the template gets the information from the url and pulls the correct page from the database... Is there a way to get PHP to read the text in the page? The text itself isnt databased. But I want it to search for those keywords and then bold them. Is the theory the same as the code you provided above? let me know and thanks.

ade1982

just a small remark, as blckspder might use this code, don't forget to put in some error handling if $start < 0