Re: Help with search engine and splitting values needed :-(

Try this function to search multiple fields for multiple words: // $fields is an array of fieldnames to search on // $words is an array of search words function buildSearch($fields, $words) { for ($i = 0; $i < count($words); $i++) {

       for ($j = 0; $j < count($fields); $j++) {
          $arr[] = $fields[$j] . " LIKE '%" . $words[$i] . "%'";
       }

} return join(" OR ", $arr); } Example: $query = "afr trib"; // your search words from eg. a form $words = split(" ", $query); // split the words into an array $fields = array("title, text"); // Field names you want to search in $sql = "select * from table where " . buildSearch($fields, $words); This will return all rows with any of the specified words in any of the specified fields. Chris Payne wrote:

Hi there everyone, I currently have a partially written search engine for a client and it works fine using the WHERE / LIKE settings (I'm using MySQL with the latest PHP for Windows to program). My question is this: Currently if you enter a single word it searches fine - if you enter afr it will bring all entries for africa or anything similar to afr which is what I need. However, how do I make it so that if they enter several words on the line that it searches for each word? I know it's probably straight forward to most people, but i'm stumped. I guess it needs to split the string from the form and then run the LIKE command on each string, but I don't know how to split the string and then get the DB to read each one? Any help would be sincerely appreciated - in newbie form though please :-) Thank you. Chris Payne chris@planetoxygene.com http://www.planetoxygene.com