mysql theory lesson

[gishaust]

hi everyone,

I need someone to give me a little direction. Below I have the code that I am trying to understand . But because I am so new to mysql I am having trouble. This script is suposed to do a search on the database. But I am getting loss in the code any help would be great?
I have written the question I have and the code under neath.

gishaust

Q1.Is the will the following code allowing me to access the the database I have designed?

      $host=‘localhost′;
      $name=‘server’;
      $pass=‘zxcv’;
      $sname = ‘custom’;

  mysql_connect ($host, $name, $pass);  

  mysql_select_db($sname) or die(‘Cannot select database’);

Q2. This recieves get variable that comes from the form on this script and pass it onto the
search variable is that right?

      if(isset($_GET[’search’]))
      {
      	$search = $_GET[’search’];
      }

Q3. I can't work this out why do I need to explode something to search if I want to pass the variable to $keywords. Why don't i $keywords = $search;?

$keywords = explode(" ", $search);

Q4.
The if statement is to see if $search has something in the string but what is % in there for?
$query is searching the database is that right?
The select is looking at the table called customerss in the database I have connected too?
"WHERE column1 LIKE ‘%".$keywords[$i]."%’". I have no idea!!!

		if ($search == NULL or $search == ‘%’){} else {
		for ($i=0; $i<count($keywords); $i++) {
					$query = "SELECT * FROM customerss " .
					"WHERE column1 LIKE &#8216;%".$keywords[$i]."%&#8217;".
					" OR column2 LIKE &#8216;%".$keywords[$i]."%&#8217;" .
					" OR column3 LIKE &#8216;%".$keywords[$i]."%&#8217;" .
					" OR column4 LIKE &#8216;%".$keywords[$i]."%&#8217;" .
					" ORDER BY column1";
					}
      	$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
      }

This form is so I do the search on the database?

		echo "<br /><form name='searchform' method='GET' action='".$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']."'>";
		echo "<input type='text' name='search' size='20' TABINDEX='1' />";
		echo " <input type='submit' value='Search' />";
		echo "</form>";

If this is all correct how do I get it to show on the page?

[leatherback]

1, 2: Yes.
3: It splits the sentence into individual words, otherwise the database will try to match the exact string or words, which is usually not what you are after
4:% is a wildcard, basically telling the database that any characters could be in tat location. This will make sure that if you type boat you will find boats, houeboat etc./
$query is a variable that holds the query to be send to the database. mysql_query() does the actual querying
where ...: This is what does the actual 'work'. It is telling the database to look in 'Colum1' of the database (where colum1 should be the name of a field in the database.table) and find allr ecords that contain keyword[$i]

Just past ethe whole ting on a page with <?php ?> around it and it should work,

[gishaust]

Thanks for the reply and helping understand the script it was something I found on the web and tried to work it out piece by piece. I did not know the the columns were column names in the database. I'll will give it a try.

So if my assumption is correct if I use only one column name it will only search that column which is great. Because that was the next question!!!!