RE: [PHP] Sigh :)

OK, I think I've solved this, and you'll probably kick yourself when I explain it!" But first, a teaser: what looks like a double-quote in HTML, but isn't? >-----Original Message----- >From: John Taylor-Johnston > If I run the SQL in PHPMyAdmin, (a MySQL web interface), it works. > > jdaxell.ccl = 2 records found. > > SELECT id,AU,ST,BT,AT FROM ccl_main WHERE MATCH > (TNum,YR,AU,ST,SD,BT,BC,AT,PL,PR,PG,LG,AUS,KW,GEO,AN,RB,CO) > AGAINST ('"ready maria"' IN BOOLEAN MODE) > ORDER BY id asc > > But try to pass it through PHP - zippo. MySQL thinks it is a boolean > search for > +ready +maria > not an exact search for the two words together > > "ready maria" > > MySQL does not see the double quotes. It should. Somehow, PHP is > thwarting them? Not PHP, your browser, I suspect. In fact there are no quotes there! No, donm't yell at me, there really aren't!! Close inspection of the source of your "non-working" result reveals that what it has actually searched for is "ready maria" -- which, of course, displays on the screen as "ready maria", with the HTML " entities converted to double quotes! Of course, as the $search variable actually contains the version with the " entities, this is what MySQL sees, and duly regards it as a non-quoted string contining the words quot, ready and maria, and a few non-significant punctuation marks! What I think is happening is that your browser is encoding certain characters in the form field into HTML entities before submitting them -- so to get PHP to see them correctly, you're going to need to unencode any HTML-entities in the string in your $search variable. I suggest a quick visit to the manual page for html_entity_decode (http://www.php.net/html-entity-decode) may be in order (this function is not available until PHP 4.3.0, but the manual page does give a pre-4.3.0 alternative). (Of course, don't forget to keep the HTML-entities version for echoing back to your HTML results page!) This was a neat one -- hope this analysis helps! Cheers! Mike