basic search engine with PHP

[trevor]

Hi everyone,

I'm back

Yeah, I am having a little trouble getting a basic search engine working on a website that I'm building.
I got one working where it is only looking for a single word, ie.

search by city - user enters "toronto",

and I have a line:

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE city LIKE 'search' order by Id";

and that works fine because I only have to search one field with one word.

But I need to add a search engine that searches for users by first and last name.

So say someone enters 'John Smith' and my database is set up where the users name is stored under 'first' and 'last'.

Sorry my PHP is pretty rusty, I played around with it a fair bit a few years ago (some people here may remember me), but anyways I took on a little project to I have to learn it all again :-)

I hope that makes sense.

thanks,
Trevor

[redhead]

How about something like this:

PHP Code:

$string = $_POST['search'];
/* split string at spaces */
$tok = strtok($string, " ");
$items = array();
/* fetch every item from the list */
while ($tok !== false) {
   $items[]=$tok;
   $tok = strtok(" ");
}
/* create SQL statement */
if(count($items)){
  /* theres somethign to search for */
  $query="SELECT * FROM users WHERE ";
  foreach($items as $item){
    /* we have no knowledge of how many items they've entered */
    if(isset($been_here))
      $query .= " OR ";
    /* we dont know if they entered "firstname lastname" or "lastname firstname" */
    $query .= "firstname LIKE \"%$item%\" OR lastname LIKE \"%$item%\"";
    $been_here = 1;
  }
} 


[trevor]

awesome I'll give it a try. Thanks!

[trevor]

Yeah, awesome, I got it workin now, at least I think so. Thanks redhead!