More advanced way to search for LIKE names...

[melting_dog]

Hi guys,

 

I have a list of products and I want to create a way to display similar products when a user views a particular product. I am thinking about doing it a certain way but need some advice on how to make it happen. I think I would do it like:

 

Get the name of the existing product

explode() the name by space" " e.g (explode(" ",$productname));

place the reuslts in a query that looks like:

 

SELECT * FROM product WHERE name LIKE '%$arrayitem1% OR LIKE '%arrayitem2%  OR LIKE '%arrayitem3%''

 

Im pretty fuzzy on the whole explode() part. Can anyone please give me some advice or point me in the direction of a similar tutorial/piece of code?

 

Thanks heaps!

[QuickOldCar]

My best advice for you would be looking into doing fulltext searches

[QuickOldCar]

But here is a simple way to explode the search words and insert it into the query, you may also use AND versus the OR

 

$searchTerms = explode(' ', $productname);
$searchWords = array();
foreach ($searchTerms as $searchwords) {
    $searchwords = trim($searchwords);
    if (!empty($searchwords)) {
        $searchWord[] = "name LIKE '%$searchwords%'";
    }
}


$query2 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM product WHERE ".implode(' OR ', $searchWord).");

[Psycho]

But here is a simple way to explode the search words and insert it into the query, you may also use AND versus the OR

 

$searchTerms = explode(' ', $productname);
$searchWords = array();
foreach ($searchTerms as $searchwords) {
    $searchwords = trim($searchwords);
    if (!empty($searchwords)) {
        $searchWord[] = "name LIKE '%$searchwords%'";
    }
}


$query2 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM product WHERE ".implode(' OR ', $searchWord).");

 

If you are exploding a name on spaces, using trim on the value would probably have no effect (unless the name has tabs in it). But, you should definitely use mysql_real_escape_string() as well as filter out empty values (in case the name had two or more successive spaces).

 

Some slight modifications that I would make:

$searchTerms = explode(' ', $productname);
$searchTerms = array_filter($searchTerms); //Remove empties
foreach ($searchTerms as &$term)
{
    $term = "name LIKE '%" . mysql_real_escape_string($term) . "%'";
}

$query = "SELECT * FROM product WHERE " . implode(' OR ', $searchWord);

[melting_dog]

Thanks heaps guys, that did the trick!

 

-if anyone else is copying this just a slight grammatical correction to mjdamatos great code:

 

$query = "SELECT * FROM product WHERE " . implode(' OR ', $searchTerms);