RE: [PHP] Checking for existing records[Scanned]

Thanks - I'll try to add these checks. Life would be so much easier if it weren't for the users :-) Michael Egan -----Original Message----- From: Jay Blanchard [mailto:jay.blanchard@niicommunications.com] Sent: 02 June 2003 14:38 To: Michael Egan; PHP General (E-mail) Subject: RE: [PHP] Checking for existing records[Scanned] [snip] When saving records to a table I generally do a fairly standard check to ensure that there is not already a record of the same name. I even put a big warning message on the page asking users to check to ensure that a record of a particular name doesn't already exist before they create a new record. But this hasn't stopped entries such as the following: Record x: "The Prince's Trust" Record y: "The Princes Trust" Record z: "the Prince's Trust" I know I won't be able to make any application entirely foolproof but are there any steps I could use within the combination of MySQL and PHP that might minimize such duplication? [/snip] Just some very quick thoughts.... Convert to either all uppers or all lowers (in the background) and check againsts something done to the DB similarly. I would say that you could do a LIKE query against the DB entries where the string length is similar (a diff of one or two characters, but this could be really innefficent and perhaps inaccurate. I am in the middle of trying to make a LIKE query more efficient....it is a bear! Anyhow, that is some very quick thoughts... HTH! Jay