Re: search

"AJDIN BRANDIC" <abrandic@coventry.ac.uk> wrote: > I've got search facility (php-mysql) which is very simple. If i search > for 'dog' it will find any records containing words 'dog' or > 'dogs' or > 'dogowner' etc. But if I search for 'dogs', words 'dog' and > 'dogowner' > will not be found. This is a classic case so there must be a solution to > it but I cannot find one. I tried to do something like > if word is 'dogs' then I do the search, > then break word 'dogs' into an array and check if the last element is an > 's'. If it is remove it, reconstrust the string,which will give 'dog', > and do search for that too. > Then display results. Well I connot find a way of breaking a string into > an array. How do I break 'mynameis' into an array of 8 elements? > This has got loopholes but still it is better than what I have now. Ajdin, you may want to take a look at mnoGoSearch, which is search engine software with a C indexer, PHP front-end and ability to work with numerous databases, including MySQL. It's a great program, but even if it's not suitable for what you're doing I suggest looking at the PHP code and database structure. mnoGoSearch has incorporated the ability to search for related words by incorporating a dictionary file and a database table of grammar rules so a search for one word can be made to find other forms of that word. FYI, to break a string into an array like you describe use strlen() to get the length of the string, substr() to pull out the first N characters from the string, then loop through and add each element to an array by adding as follows (pseudocode): for ( $i = strlen( $string ); $i >= 0; $i-- ) $array[] = substr( $string, 0, $i ); -- Steve Werby President, Befriend Internet Services LLC http://www.befriend.com/