[RESOLVED] Stumped by Terminology - Search the WhatchamaCallit

artnow

Hi all -

This is terribly frustrating for me as I rarely know what terminology to use to explain what I am trying to achieve. I enjoy trying to figure things out but I am lost as to the words I need to search/use to resolve my own problems ...

So, here it is:

$promo_type is the row and it might contain "John,Paul,George,Ringo" but the names are in no particular order and may not all be there.

I want to search $promo_type for the word "Paul" and if it is there echo just "Paul"

I hope someone can make heads or tails of what I want to do.

Bob

bradgrafelman

artnow;10996803 wrote:
$promo_type is the row

Er wait... what do you mean "the row" ? Do you mean you're interacting with a DBMS and you've retrieved some data from it? If so, can you show us the table structure/schema and perhaps the PHP code you use to retrieve the data? That might help us understand what you're doing.

artnow;10996803 wrote:
it might contain "John,Paul,George,Ringo" but the names are in no particular order and may not all be there.

Why do you have multiple values packed together into a single string? If this data is coming directly from the DB, then I'd say you need to normalize your DB schema since you don't even meet the First Normal Form (1NF).

If that string isn't coming directly from the DB but the individual names are, then I would say you need to rethink how you're handling data that you retrieve from the DB. For example, you could create an [man]array[/man] instead; you could then use [man]in_array/man to check if a given name is contained in that array.

artnow

"The row" (is it a row?) is from a sql statement result, from the table column named promo_type. There are 7 possible options for promo_type and only those selected will be put into the database (ie. John,Paul,George,Ringo)

As for multiple values packed together into a single string ... um ... I don't know, lol, that's the way I built it? However, I learned that those value packed together are called a string (not an array as I had assumed).

Even more exciting, after searching strings I found strpos() and ended up with this:

$findword  = 'Paul';

$found = strpos($promo_type, $findword);
if ($found === false) {
} else {
   echo "Paul";
}

]

It appears to work.

Bbo

bradgrafelman

artnow;10996809 wrote:
There are 7 possible options for promo_type and only those selected will be put into the database (ie. John,Paul,George,Ringo)

While there is a column type that mirrors this behavior (the SET type), it still violates the First Normal Form, and can make querying the DB more complex in situations that a normalized database would not.

artnow;10996809 wrote:
I learned that those value packed together are called a string (not an array as I had assumed).

It's not really called anything... it's just a normal string, no different than the string "Hello world!". And therein lies the problem; you're cramming multiple values into a single string container, so you end up with a single "cell" that can contain multiple distinct elements.

artnow;10996809 wrote:
Even more exciting, after searching strings I found strpos() and ended up with this:
$findword  = 'Paul';

$found = strpos($promo_type, $findword);
if ($found === false) {
} else {
   echo "Paul";
}

]
It appears to work.

The real solution would be to normalize your DB such that you no longer have any multi-valued columns. Once you do that, querying the DB to determine if an entity contains a given promo_type would be trivial.

You might want to find a few good articles on Database Normalization before you go designing any more databases (or even working with ones you've already got).

artnow

Looks like I have a lot of work ahead of me!

For now, as it's used internally only, I figure I can stumble along with it and once I learn more and implement at least the First Normal Form, I will revisit this again.

I appreciate that you took the time to get to the root of my programming (now I'm sure that's the wrong word) fiascos (much more appropriate word)!

Bob

jcswart

While brad is right about setting up your DB properly, a more concise \ easy to read way of writing the code you already have would be:

$findword = 'Paul'; 

$found = strpos($promo_type, $findword); 
if ($found !== false) { 
    echo "Paul"; 
}

Derokorian

Also, you could do this to use what you have without changing your DB (tho you really should have better DB schema)

$findwords = array('Paul','John','Ringo','George','Mary','Bob','Ashley'); // 7 words to look for

foreach( $findwords as $word ) {
   if( strpos($promo_type,$word) !== FALSE ) {
      echo $word;
   }
}

Obviously you'd have to change the find word array to contain the words you're looking for.

bradgrafelman

If we're really talking about throwing caution to the wind and forgetting all about the DB schema changes that need to be made, then you could simply use a function already built into MySQL: FIND_IN_SET().