[SOLVED] Making a search on my site

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I'm updating my site's layout and adding a search box.  I thought I had the code for it all squared away until I realized that there was a fundamental problem with it.  Right now this is how I have my query:

 

SELECT * FROM `news` WHERE `news_title` LIKE '% ".$find." %' OR `news_text` LIKE '% ".$find." %' ORDER BY `news_id` DESC

 

$find is the php variable I'm passing from the search form.  Anyways, you'll notice how it looks for "[space][search text][space]".  Well what if the text you're searching for is the first or last word or words of the title or news content?  For example, I have a title called "Halo Wars Demo Cutscenes in HD", so a search for "Halo Wars" should have returned that news post, but it doesn't.  A search for Wars returns 2 results, the above titled, and one about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.  How could I overcome this problem without removing the space from the query?  If I remove the space then a search for the word "read" would return results with th eword "thread" because "thread" contains the word "read".  How can I fix that?

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Nevermind, I solved it myself.  Here is the modified code I used:

 

On the PHP side I had to seperate the words in the search string and add [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] to the beginning and end of each, respectively, then trim the whitespace off the end:

 

$findarr = explode(" ", $find);
foreach($findarr as $word) {
  $searchstr .= "[[:<:]]".$word."[[:>:]] ";
  }

$searchstr = trim($searchstr);

 

Then I had to change my query a little:

 

SELECT * FROM `news` WHERE `news_title` REGEXP '".$searchstr."' OR `news_text` REGEXP '".$searchstr."' ORDER BY `news_id` DESC

 

And that did the trick.  REGEXP treats [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] like the beginning and end of a word, no matter what.  So I just had to padd each word with those on the beginning and end and insert a space in between words, trim off the last space and I was golden.  Returns results where the word being searched for is a whole word, meaning searching for "read" will not return "thread", and searching for a word at the beginning of a sentence will work just fine.