Need help searching my database

[Accurax]

2 tables in my database, and i need to create a function that will allow a user to search these tables and then display the results in a given order.

I'm having serious trouble finding a tutorial on how to achieve this ...... please, does anyone know of a half decent tutorial that i can follow as i could really do with learning how to achieve this asap.

If you could post any links you have id really really appreciate it... thankuyyou guys

[Psycho]

Well, your description is a little vague.

here are some tutorials that may or may not have what you are looking for:
http://www.tizag.com/mysqlTutorial/mysqlquery.php
http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/show/3998/7/

If you were to describe the format of your tables and how you want to search them and wheat data you want retrieved., I think we could probably provide the code as well as an explanation of how it works.

[chronister]

create a search form. Pass the data to a sql query

$query="SELECT * FROM table1, table2 WHERE field1, field2 LIKE '%$searchvar%';

this query will select all from the 2 tables where field1 or field 2 is like the string entered in the search box.



The % is a wildcard character. %abc% will find 123abc456def , %abc will find 123abc, abc% will find abc456def

assuming there is a string in the DB like this  123abc456def

[Accurax]

Thanks guys,

Heres a little more detail ..

I have two tables, one holds personal information about a member, and the other holds a link to their avatar, now, i want to create quite a detailed form that allows a user to select various options from drop down menu's.. as well as a keyword match to an individuals profile.

I want the script to take the fields selected and match them to users in the database, for example

SELECT * FROM users WHERE age=26 && musictaste=opera && .... && .. && etc etc

however, i dot want the entire form to have to be completed, id like the script to simplt ignore form fields that were not changed from the dafault, thus allowing a user to tailor their own search parameters.

And as i mentioned, id like a full text search, that matched entered strings to any text that appears in several given fields in my table.

Then i want to display these results on a webpage... I understand that i need to use LIMIT in order to get results showing accross several pages, and so i need to look into this.

As far as results display goes... its simply the avatar and the username linking to each users profile.

[Psycho]

Well...

When the form is submitted youwill just need to parse the field data to build your query string based upon the fields that have data. Here is one possible example:
[code]$sql = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE ";
if ($_POST['age']) { $whereAry[] = "age = ". $_POST['age']; }
if ($_POST['musictaste']) { $whereAry[] = "musictaste = ". $_POST['musictaste']; }
//etc.
$whereClause = implode(" AND ", $whereAry);
$sql .= $whereClause;[/code]

For full-text searching and pagination take a look at the tutorials on this site:
[url=http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/129/0.php]MySQL Full-Text Searching with PHP[/url]
[url=http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/147/0.php]Expanded Pagination[/url]