Improving my search script

[9999]

This piece of code searches the $info field of my delimited text file database:

[code]foreach ($file as $line => $data)
{
    list($month, $day, $year, $info) = explode('|', trim($data) );
    if (stristr($info, $search))
    {
    echo $info;
    }
}[/code]
I have 3 Questions:

1) Lets say a person was searching for "John Smith" they could enter "John Smith" or "John" or "Smith" and it would work.  I would like to improve my search so that if a person searched for "John Smith" it would also find results for "John T. Smth" or " John Q. Smith" etc.  Is there an easy way to do this?

2)  How can I sort the $year field?

3)  For each record, the data in my $info is 2 or 3 sentences long.  When the current script returns a result, there is only 1 space between sentences even though there are 2 in my database.  Any suggestions on how I can fix this?

Thanks in advance

[hitman6003]

[quote]
1) Lets say a person was searching for "John Smith" they could enter "John Smith" or "John" or "Smith" and it would work.  I would like to improve my search so that if a person searched for "John Smith" it would also find results for "John T. Smth" or " John Q. Smith" etc.  Is there an easy way to do this?
[/quote]

I would say to break the string apart and then do a search for both words and only return the results that have both in them, regarless of order or what's between them.

[quote]2)  How can I sort the $year field?[/quote]

You have to create a multidimensional array, then sort it.  You can create a normal array, then use array_multisort, or you can create an array that has the year as the keys, and then sort the keys.  Just be careful with the latter because duplicate keys will over write eachother.

[quote]3)  For each record, the data in my $info is 2 or 3 sentences long.  When the current script returns a result, there is only 1 space between sentences even though there are 2 in my database.  Any suggestions on how I can fix this?[/quote]

What do you mean it only returns one space but there are two in the db?  Please clarify.

[9999]

In my database, for a given record, the $info field might contain multiple sentences that have the standard 2 spaces after the period.  When that record is extracted and echoed, there is only one space after the period.  It does it in every case.  I thought the trim function was causing it, but it does it even when I remove it.

[Yesideez]

Browsers will automatically remove multiple spaces and replace them with one single space. What you need to do is replace the two spaces with   (non-break space) if you want those two spaces to appear.

Browsers treat the non-break space as text even though you can't see it so you can do this:
[code]echo $info.' ';[/code]
That way the browser will replace the two spaces with one single space and the non-break space will be tagged onto the end giving the illusion of two spaces.

[9999]

Ok but what if my $info contains 3 sentences?  Would this work after each one or just the last one>

[Jeremysr]

You could replace all ". "'s with ".  "

[code=php:0]$info = str_replace(". ", ".  ", $info);[/code]

[biotech]

did you make this to work,i mean the search thing..i need this badly too