Been reading the 'newbies' section and watching with envy the people who dont know how to execute a particular function - if only I knew what questions I needed the answers to.
I'm looking to create a simple database which contains values of production data (for a classic car). A visitor to my site will fill in a single field with his VIN (vehicle identification number) - and possibly some sort of CAPTCHA or similar - and submits his form, which will then 'decode' his VIN for him. No adding anything to the db or anything like that - a 'read only' interrogation*. My trouble is, I have no idea where to even start! I only picked php as the tool of choice since I already have a phpbb forum so I know php runs on my hosts server, but googling for PHP DATABASE SCRIPT only gives me sites that ARE a database of php scripts! Am I looking at the right tool for the job, and if so, are there any 'walk-through' tutorials that could point me in the right direction?
Many thanks for any advice at all!
*Its not quite so easy as that, though, in that the VIN is comprised of six seperate parts, which identify things like 'year of manufacture', 'factory', 'colour', etc., but two of the parts could contain either 2 or 3 characters. The visitor entering the data isn't going to be aware of which particular digits of it decode which bit, so I cant ask him to 'break it up' for me.
As an example
VIN entered: BR32ADL412345
would translate as:
BR = Brazil
32 = 1962 build year
A = Grey
DL = De Luxe model
4 = 2-litre model
12345 = serial number.
but the VIN entered of: USA34BS5a23456
would translate as:
USA = United States model
34 = 1964 build year
B = Black
S = Super
5a = 2.5 litre model
23456 = serial number
Somehow, my db needs to know whether a particular digit is the last letter of one field, or the first letter in the next. How on earth is that possible!
