Free form text searches with AND OR etc.

Anon

Talk about hitting a brick wall....

I'm trying to find a way of doing a fre-form/keyword search of a MYSQL database with radio buttons for OR, AND, LIKE as options.

Also the old "some-text" seach would be usefull. I guess theres got to be some sort of array in there but I don't know where to start.

At the moment theres only one table. But I may add a second for category.

All help appreciated.

Anon

clear your question.. do you want us to write the entire search script for you ???

Anon

No, not at all.

There are two seperate questions here really.

I would like to build a search engine that uses radio buttons for OR, AND, LIKE to search a database for one or more keywords. I've used the article on 'slapping together a search engine' to seperate each word out and the actual SQL is not a problem. What I dont get is how to use the result from a radio button to select the relivant query.

I'd like to use quotes for selecting a piece of text from the orriginal (unstripped) data but have no idea on how to code the search.

Anon

even your question is still not clear.. that is why you couldn't get answer yet..

Try to give example..

[deleted]

Simon, I don't understand question 2.

The first question's fairly easy.

You need to break your query up into the different clauses. So you'll have part one be something like

$query="select tid,keyword from search_table";

Part two is your where, and this is where it gets tricky.

Let's say you have three sets of radio buttons on your page. Call each set 1, 2, or 3.

(sample code:
<input type="radio" name="rad1" checked value="and" />and
<input type="radio" name="rad1" value="or" />or
   <input type="text" name="text1" />
)

So what you want to do is to build a routine that concatenates the result of each set of and/ors into your query. You repeat this for as many text boxes with and/ors that you're going to have, obviously changing the number from 1 to whatever.

(sample code:
if($text1) {
$query=$query." ".$rad1." ".$text1;
}
)

So it tests to make sure there's something in the text box, and then it concatenates everything on to the end.

Obviously there's more efficient ways to do it using loops and an array, but this is the general theory, and it will get you started.

Anon

Thanks Karl,

That makes sense.

One further question though is how do I remove duplicate results.

For example,if the search is for, say, 'computer' or 'email' and either one or both appear at least once in record 1 , how can I prevent the query from returning record 1 more than once?

Anon

depending on what you're selecting out, you can use 'select distinct'. Or, you can do it the hard (but much better way) and build an array from the result and then use the php functions to flip the values to keys, which, interestingly enough, turns the values of the new array into the count of the results. Put in logic to do it for each word or to do it for a phrase if there are " "'s (use regexps for this) and you've got yourself a really powerful search engine.

Anon

Again thanks Karl,

Two questions though,

When you say array from the result you mean the record no?
Youv'e lost me there with the 'flip the values to keys' bit? not something I've come across

Anon

grin Sorry, just coded it.. seemed simple to me 'cuz I already grokked it.

Answer to 1:
Yes. If you search through your keys table, your result will look something like this:
id_array[]:
1
1
1
3
3
3
3
3
5
6

so... Answer to 2:
What you really want is something like this:
article3name (5)
article1name (3)
article5name (1)
article6name (1)

So first you need to run array_count_values($id_array), which will give you something like:
$id_array[1]=3
$id_array[3]=5
$id_array[5]=1
$id_array[6]=1

Then you can do it a couple of ways, but basically, you need to create an array or a query to pull the article names out, based on the key values of $id_array. You can get the keys back by creating a new array and calling something like $keys=array_keys($id_array).

Does that make any sense at all? I just had a conversation with my girlfriend in code... I think I need to go take some mind-altering substances now.