Weird Wildcard Search

Hi all, I have a weird problem when doing my wildcard search. I have a search.php3 form (with about 10 criterias) which will call the sresults.php3. The first round always works fine but the second time is very erratic. Questions: 1) Is there any part that I did wrongly? 2) How can I make the $ref sent by search.php3 global - able to use by any file? I tried <? global $ref; ?> and it didn't seem to work. 3) Is there anywhere else that I can read up on this or anyone has any sample code? I have consulted these book but it didn't help. MySQL by Paul DuBios (New Riders) PHP Programming by Castanetto, Rawat, Schumann, Scollo, Veliath (Wrox) MySQL and mSQL by Yarger, Reese & King (O'Reilly) Example of my run results: search.php3 - %$ref% = '30' First round is fine - sqlstmt = "SELECT * from my_table WHERE ref like '%30%'" Second round using the next 15 record gave me sqlstmt - "SELECT * from my_table WHERE ref like '0%'" If I use only $ref% - string starts with it works. search.php3 - $ref% = '30' First round is fine - sqlstmt = "SELECT * from my_table WHERE ref like '30%'" Second round using the next 15 record gave me sqlstmt - "SELECT * from my_table WHERE ref like '30%'" Extract of my coding. (partial) ******************************* filename - sresults.php3 $MaxRow = 15; if ($REQUEST_METHOD=='POST') { $searchstmt = "SELECT * from my_table WHERE "; if ($ref) $searchstmt .= "ref like '%$ref%' and "; . . $stmt = substr($searchstmt, 0, strlen($searchstmt)-4); $sqlstmt = $stmt . " ORDER BY ref DESC"; } // if POST . . [ db browsing using the LIMIT ] echo " <a href=\"sresults.php3?sqlstmt=$sqlstmt&CR=$CR&RL=$y\">[Next]</a>"; $sqlstmt = stripslashes("$sqlstmt"); sqlstmt = $sqlstmt . " LIMIT $RL,$MaxRow"; Sorry for the long posting.