Newbie question

[foxden]

I hope this is easy.

I have a "search engine" on my site. It's quite simple, allows users to enter in keywords seperated by commas. Then I split the array and look for $kywd in MySQL. The problem is that if submit is clicked with empty values, it returns a response meeting the active=yes. Here is a snippet:

       $key_array = split("," , "$keyword");
                  foreach ($key_array as $kywd) {

         $sql = " 
                  SELECT * from $table_name 
                  WHERE (active = 'yes'
                  and value_1 like '%$kywd%'
                  OR  value_2 like '%$kywd%')
                ";

[[deleted]]

And I guess your problem is that you don't what that?

So what you want is that the query is only executed IF $keywd != ""?

Do I need to hint more? :-)

[foxden]

Yes, well I guess so. I thought SQL would error or return an empty query???

[[deleted]]

Why would it?

If you leave both values blank, you end up with a query like this:

SELECT * from $table_name
WHERE (active = 'yes'
and value_1 like '%%'
OR value_2 like '%%')

that is a perfectly ok query, it just doesn't make much sense.
What it will do is look for all records where active=yes, and value_1 is 'anything followed by anything', and value_2 is 'anything followed by anything'

Effectively, that just means it will list all records where active=yes (the other two are always true anyway)

[foxden]

Makes more sense now.

Thanks Vincent!

[[deleted]]

You're welcome.

[foxden]

GOt it working now. Thanks again.