help searching a database

cs1h

Hi,

I'm new to php and Mysql, I am trying to develope a databse for travel reviews. So far people can submit articles to my database but I cannot get a search to work with the criteria I want. I have tried to find tutorials online but none of them do what I need.

If any one can point me to one that would help or one give me some hints it would be much appriciated.

My search form is as follows

<body>
<form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="">
  <label>
  Select type of article you want
  <select name="lista" id="lista">
    <option>News </option>
    <option>Magazine</option>
    <option>Listing</option>
    </select>
  <br />
  Select Region 
  <select name="listb" id="listb">
    <option>Africa</option>
    <option>Asia</option>
    <option>Europe</option>
    <option>North America</option>
    <option>Oceania</option>
    <option>South America</option>
  </select>
  </label>
  <p>Search for a Keyword 
    <label>
    <input type="text" name="keyword" id="keyword" />
    </label>
  </p>
</form>
</body>

And my database table is,

Article_type VARCHAR 100, Place VARCHAR 100, Article TEXT

I want people to be able to select the article type, then select the places that they want and then matching words in the article.

Any help would be much appriciated,

Thanks,
Colin

sneakyimp

NOTE That the order the user enters the keywords would be important in this example. If you want the order to not be important, you will need to loop through $keywords and create a series of OR clauses which would like something like:

AND (
Article LIKE '%keyword1%'
OR Article LIKE '%keyword2%'
OR Article LIKE '%keyword3%'
)

try this:

// split the phrase by any number of commas or space characters,
// which include " ", \r, \t, \n and \f
$keywords = preg_split("/[\s,]+/", trim($_POST['keyword']));
$sql = "SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE Article_type='" . mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['lista']=) . "' AND Place='" . mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['listb']=) . "' AND Article LIKE '%" . implode('%', $keywords) . "%'";

You might also create a full-text search index on your mysql table and read up on full-text search in the mysql documentation.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html