Forms and empty space

harkly

I have a form that sends the info to another page. I trimmed the empty space off the front and end of the string but am wondering about the middle? I have a list of artists and would like to be able to search them if the user inputs to many spaces - like www.imdb.com.

Any ideas as where I need to be looking?

Also, what about misspellings?

I would like my search to work very similar to the imdb.com one

devinemke

you could use [man]explode[/man] to spool the string into an array of keywords using the space as the delimiter. if you do then you may want run each array value through [man]trim[/man] in case someone types in a double space.

harkly

How would I go about putting the string back together? In order to search on it.

this is my code so far,

$field=$_POST["field"];

$search=trim($_POST["find"]);

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

if ($field == "artist")

{
	echo "<b>Names of Artist(s)</b> <br><br>";

	$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM artist WHERE fullName LIKE '%$checked%'");
	$num_rows=mysql_num_rows($result);

		if ($num_rows != "0")
			{
				$count = count(0);

devinemke

a simple example:

$_POST['keywords'] = 'this is an example';

$keywords = trim($_POST['keywords']);
$keywords = split('[ ]+', $keywords);
foreach ($keywords as $key => $value)
{
	$value = trim($value);
	$keywords[$key] = "fullName LIKE '%" . addslashes($value) . "%'";
}
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM artist WHERE ' . implode(' OR ', $keywords);

echo $sql;

Roger_Ramjet

If you want to cater for misspellings then you can try the SOUNDEX function.

As to the basic search, you should be using Full Text Search anyway. That will handle the words and spaces automatically - and is bound to be what that linked site is using.