Re: [PHP] Search/Regular Expression problem

[Chris Hayes]

At 21:48 13-3-2003, you wrote:
My search enginue will bring up a result IF and only if ALL of the words in
$search exist in the result.  For example
if
$search = Vax Useful Commands

Then the result is only true if (eregi(".*Vax.*Useful.*Commands.*",
'possible result')) is true
Are your data in a database? In that case it is much faster to use a query 
to check whether the words are in some record. Regular expressions can take 
quite some time!



Now, I don't know how many words there are in $search initially.  How do I
do a search like that?  I mean if I know $search is 3 words then I can do
$words = preg_split("/  /", $search);
I like the 'explode()' function very much , which splits a string on a 
separator (can be ' ') and puts the results in a long array.





if (eregi(".*words[0].*words[1].*words[2].*", 'possible result')) {
 .....
}
Even if I know how many words there are, everytime the number of words in
$search can be different.
So if you have used explode() then you can do a loop that goes through the 
array, for instance

$searchwords=explode(' ', $search);

for ($x=0;$x<count($searchwords);$x++)
{//build the search command OR build the query
// i recommend to make it a query, so:
$WHERE.= ' AND textfield=LIKE '"%'.$searchwords[$x].'%"';

}

//now cut off the first ' AND '
 $WHERE=substr($WHERE,4,strlen($WHERE);
now finish the query
  $query="SELECT title,text,ID FROM tablename ".$WHERE;
then proceed by doing the query and showing the results.







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