searching for inspiration HELP :)

[rondelli]

Look guys, I`m trying to build something here but have absolutely no idea where to start.

Basically I want to build a user text input form, where a user can type some text and after submitting the form, my php program will fetch the text, search the text for key words and output a list of possible categories.

So per say lets say the user types something like: I would like to buy a car.
In my mysql db I will have a table CATEGORY like : id_cat(TINYINT PK NOT NULL UNSG), descr(VARCHAR NOT NULL), tags(??????). The tags data type(I need your help here, cause I don`t exactly know of a "list" data type in MySQL and the ENUM Type will only contain one word per assignment, i need an array of strings) will contain a list of words like: car, auto, etc. .

After the query is done, my program should say something like this: "Hey so this guy is looking for automobiles (CATEGORY TABLE) because I found that the word "car" matches with a value stored in the ???data type in the column TAGS in the CATEGORY TABLE.

Any help is appreciated

[paulnaj]

You might to try a three-table approach

Table 1:
id_cat (INT PK)
descr_cat (VARCHAR)

table 2:
id_tag (INT PK)
descr_tag (VARCHAR)

table 3:
id_cat (INT)
id_tag (INT)

The PK for table 3 would be id_cat+id_tag.

This way, any category could have any number of tags, and any tag could be associated with any number of categories.

Google 'many-to-many relationships' to learn more.

P.