Re: Searching on AlphaNumeric Content Only

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Ashley Sheridan<ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote: > On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 12:12 -0700, sono-io@fannullone.us wrote: >>       Thanks to everyone who has responded.  After reading everyone's >> response, I think I have a very simple way to solve my "problem". >> >>       Using my original example, if someone wants to find item # >> 4D-2448-7PS, no matter what they type in, I'll take the input, strip >> out all non-alphanumeric characters to make it 4D24487PS, add the >> wildcard character between each of the remaining characters like so, >> 4*D*2*4*4*8*7*P*S, and then do the search. >> >>       Still being new at this, it seems to be the simplest approach, or is >> my thinking flawed?  This also keeps me from having to add another >> field in the db to search on. >> >>       BTW, this solution needs to work with any db, even ASCII files, so it >> has to happen in PHP. >> >> Thanks again, >> Frank >> > For speed you might want to consider an extra field in the DB in the > future. If the database gets larger, or your query needs to join several > tables together, then things will take a noticeable speed hit. I had a > similar issue myself where I had to search for names based on > mis-spellings of them. In the end I searched with metaphone tags on an > extra field in the DB set up for that purpose, but it was the only way > to do it that didn't affect the speed of the site. > > Thanks, > Ash > http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk > > > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > Has anyone considered deploying an actual search engine (Solr, Sphinx, etc.), as they will take care of the stripping, stemming, spelling corrections, etc?