Re: [PHP] Checking for existing records

[Daniel Stark]

You might also look into word stemming (removing suffixes and possibly 
prefixes) and comparing stemmed titles. Another possibility would be to 
find a list of commonly misspelled/misused words like (there, their, 
they're) and substitute all possibilities with one version for the 
purposes of checking the title. Also removing stop words like (the, of, 
and) and then comparing titles would be a good method. Hint: lots of 
these methods are used in Keyword finding algorithms.

You might also make the process more interactive for your users. If you 
find a title through the above methods that seems like a hit present it 
to the user and say:

"The following records were already found in the system, please verify 
that the record you are adding is unique."

Then let the user indicate whether the record is in fact unique.

hth,
Dan
On Monday, June 2, 2003, at 08:32 AM, Michael Egan wrote:

Hello all,

I'm looking for the sort of programming inspiration I suspect I won't 
find in manuals - I have checked the web first!

When saving records to a table I generally do a fairly standard check 
to ensure that there is not already a record of the same name.  I even 
put a big warning message on the page asking users to check to ensure 
that a record of a particular name doesn't already exist before they 
create a new record.  But this hasn't stopped entries such as the 
following:

Record x: "The Prince's Trust"
Record y: "The Princes Trust"
Record z: "the Prince's Trust"
Two of these were entered as consecutive records by the same person!

I know I won't be able to make any application entirely foolproof but 
are there any steps I could use within the combination of MySQL and 
PHP that might minimize such duplication?

Thanks in advance,

Michael Egan

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