help! trying to create PHP search form and it's not working

[kelseyirene]

I've been struggling with this all afternoon. The code seems correct, no problems are turning up, I'm connecting to the database, but the search isn't yielding results that I know are there. My table is fairly simple, it's basically a list of the books I own... my columns are 'num' 'title' 'author_first' 'author_last' 'isbn' and 'read'. Ideally, I'd like to be able to search for any keyword in any of the columns, but for now I just want to figure out how to do the search form.

 

Here's the code I used for the form:

 

<form method="post" action="search.php">

<div align="center">

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">

<tr>

<td bordercolor="#000000">

<p align="center">

<select name="num" size="1">

<option value="title">Title</option>

<option value="telephone">Author Last</option>

<option value="birthday">ISBN</option>

</select> <input type="text" name="search" size="25">  <br>

Search database: <input type="submit"></p>

</td>

</tr>

</table>

</div>

</form>

 

--

 

and this is the form I used for search.php:

 

<center>

<table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" bordercolor="#000000">

<tr>

<td width="60"><b>num</b></td>

<td width="100"><b>title</b></td>

<td width="70"><b>author last</b></td>

<td width="150"><b>isbn</b></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>

<?

$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password") or die(mysql_error());

 

mysql_select_db("my_db",$con);

 

?>

 

<?

//error message (not found message)begins

$XX = "No Record Found, to search again please close this window";

//query details table begins

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM TitleInfo WHERE $num LIKE '%$search%' LIMIT 0, 50");

while ($row = @mysql_fetch_array($query))

{

$variable1=$row["num"];

$variable2=$row["title"];

$variable3=$row["author_last"];

$variable4=$row["isbn"];

//table layout for results

 

print ("<tr>");

print ("<td>$variable1</td>");

print ("<td>$variable2</td>");

print ("<td>$variable3</td>");

print ("<td>$variable4</td>");

print ("</tr>");

}

//below this is the function for no record!!

if (!$variable1)

{

print ("$XX");

}

//end

?>

</table>

</center>

 

 

</html>

 

--

 

help!! what am I doing wrong?

[harkly]

It doesn't look like you are passing anything to the search form.  You have this

LIKE '%$search%'

but where is the $search, you need to define it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[cags]

As harkly says you don't manually assign a value to $search. Since your form has an input that has a name attribute of 'search' it would seem you are relying on register_globals being enabled, which it may not be.