Using loops within Query Statements

[ethos_bass]

Can someone think of a more graceful way to write this bit of code? It's a SELECT query that grows in length depending on user input. I have a simple <select list> HTML form on the previous page which outputs its results to the variable '$region_array'. The trouble is that I want the query to contain only as many OR statements as the number of rows the user selected. (In the following code the variable "$num_rows_selected" is how many items on the list the user selected.)

if ($num_rows_selected == 1)
{
$query="select * FROM bar_index WHERE region LIKE \"%$region_array[0]%\"";
}
elseif ($num_rows_selected == 2)
{
$query="select * FROM bar_index WHERE region LIKE \"%$region_array[0]%\"
OR region LIKE \"%$region_array[1]%\"";
}
elseif ($num_rows_selected == 3)
{
$query="select * FROM bar_index WHERE region LIKE \"%$region_array[0]%\"
OR region LIKE \"%$region_array[1]%\"
OR region LIKE \"%$region_array[2]%\"";
}
elseif ($num_rows_selected == 4)
{$query="select * FROM bar_index WHERE region LIKE \"%$region_array[0]%\"
OR region LIKE \"%$region_array[1]%\"
OR region LIKE \"%$region_array[2]%\"
OR region LIKE \"%$region_array[3]%\"";
}

Is it possible to use IF or WHILE statements within the query string? Or loops? And, if so, what is the proper syntax? Perhaps something like this:

$query="SELECT * FROM bar_index WHERE region
for ($i=0;$i<$num_rows_selected;$i++)
{LIKE \"%$region_array['$i']%\""}

Or something like that? Any help and insight is greatly appreciated.

[bogu]

$region_array should contain the region auto increment id of the regions and the select could be something like this ...

select * FROM bar_index WHERE regionId IN (".implode(",", $region_array).");

if you dont want to change your code, then you could do something like this, but I strongly suggest you to use auto increment key instead of strings:

if (!empty($region_array)) {
	$tmp = array();
	foreach ($region_array as $value)
		$tmp[] = "region LIKE '%".mysql_real_escape_string($value)."%' ";
	$query = "SELECT * FROM bar_index WHERE ".implode(" OR ", $tmp);
}

[ethos_bass]

Thank you very much for you advice. Though I didn't use your code verbatim it gave me an idea that had not previously occurred to me. Thank you for that! It was the 'implode' command that I had not thought of. What I decided to do was this:

$glue='%" OR region LIKE "%';
$region_implode=(implode($glue, $region_array));
$query="select * FROM bar_index WHERE region LIKE \"%$region_implode%\"";

And it works like magic!

You guys rock.

-Z