Hello everybody,

I'm trying to do a simple internal search engines for my website. What I was able to do till now is a little too much simple and also doesn't work very good...

Clicking on the button research you are addressed on search.php (of which I post the code below).
The research is necessary to find a kind of schedules composed by an image, a title and a description.
I would like that writing one or more words in the research form, I can get the results where appear those words, if is possible in a rilevance order.

Now, the problems are:

- if I write for example 2 words, separated by a space, and both the 2 words are in the same record, that record will be written 2 times.
- I can't limit the number of results using LIMIT... it doesn't work, I get all the results where that word exist.
- I could go on with the problems but these are already enough....

If somebody had a little of time to help me or at least suggest me a better way, I would be really grateful!!!

I would just build the query string like this and just run the query once ie:

Code:

$keys = explode(" ", $searchStr);

$querystr = "SELECT img,link,numclick,descrizione,ordine FROM totale_tabelle WHERE 1=1 ";

for ($x = 0; $x < count($keys); $x++) {
   $querystr .= "and concat( descrizione,' ', ordine ) like \"%$keys[$x]%\"";
}

$querystr .= " limit 20";

$result = mysql_query( $querystr );

This should be faster, produce the matches you want and have a limit on the number of records returned. I haven't tested it so there may be syntax errors in the code but hopefully you get the idea.

I'd also suggest you filter out user input to remove duplicate words

Thanks!! Like this is much better!
I've no more duplicated results and now I can limit the number of results as I want.

I have just some problems now with the last part of the code:

If I use characters not allowed I get the written "No results found", if I don't write anything I get "Your keywords contain characters not allowed".
And also I'm still not allowed to write à-è-ì-ò-ù using this in my code if (ereg("^[0-9a-zA-Zà-ù,&,'.' ]+$", $searchStr))... don't know what's wrong here...

ca\n we see the if statement that precedes the if (!$found)?

A few comments:

• You separate the search words with spaces but then raise an error as spaces are not allowed in your input string test!
• Why stop the search if nothing is entered? - just run the query and limit the results as normal.
• Why not just quietly strip bad characters from the search string - this saves another test.
• Why do you have <div> tokens in your html?
• You should get everything working without the accented characters first.
• You could also try indenting your code to make it easier to read.
• You could also experiment with comments.

I'm sorry, I've not understood exactly what you mean....

ok, understood

because I need to give some styles from css to the text I get from mysql...

yes i know, it was just one of the problems

you're right.
I'm still a beginner with php, and the code i've put together I've taken from sources I found on the web, but without understanding it in all the steps...

* You separate the search words with spaces but then raise an error as spaces are not allowed in your input string test!
I made a mistake here - I can now see a space so everything is OK

* Why not just quietly strip bad characters from the search string - this saves another test.
Use a function like ereg_replace to simply remove invalid charcters from the search string.

I'm still a beginner with php, and the code i've put together I've taken from sources I found on the web, but without understanding it in all the steps...
You'll learn slowly this way and never have confidence in your code. Better to write the comments first. Then double check these comments to make sure the program will do what you want it to do. Finally work out how to write the code that goes with each comment. Add the fancy bits later like accented characters.

Ok I was going to post here:

search keywords on multiple tables

but was redirected to this post, and this post clarified more stuff for me. Thanks mike_bike its greatly appreciated.