Searching ALL columns for keyword?

[tyhoerr]

Hello,

 

I'm trying to build a keyword search for a database of plants for a client... I'm not well versed in sql and the deadline is tomorrow to get this working... I've had no luck in the past 24 hours finding a solution on the internet.

 

Basically what I want it to do is take a keyword (or series of keywords) and search the ENTIRE database for anything like those words. I was able to get it working for searching ONE column using this code:

$find=ltrim($find);
$find=rtrim($find);

$kt=split(" ",$find);

while(list($key,$val)=each($kt)){
if($val<>" " and strlen($val) > 0){$q .= " upper(Description) like '%$val%' or ";}

}
$q=substr($q,0,(strlen($q)-3));

$query="select * from Master_table where $q ";

 

But this will only search the "Description" column, and not the other 15 columns of information. How can I code it to search through ALL of the columns and not just one of them?

 

Thanks in advance for any help!!

[requinix]

Just repeat that same thing for the other columns. By the way, unless the columns are in a binary collation, LIKE is case-insensitive - you don't need UPPER().

$find = trim($find);
$kt = preg_split('/\s+/', $find);

$conditions = array();

foreach (array("col1", "col2", "col3", "col4") as $col) {
foreach ($kt as $keyword) {
	$conditions[] = $col . " LIKE '%" . mysql_real_escape_string($keyword) . "%' ";
}
}

$query = "SELECT * FROM Master_table ";
if ($conditions) $query .= "WHERE " . implode("OR ", $conditions);

[tyhoerr]

That is PERFECT! Thank you so much for the quick response! Looks like an easy fix... obviously I still have much to learn about SQL