CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpsearch
Jackerbil
Jackerbil

Reputation: 140

Search engine for a website in PHP

I'm about to create the search engine for my website. It's actually the first time I try to do such a thing, so I took a look around the internet and also here on StackOverflow, but I still have some questions, so I hope you can give me some advice.

Now, considering this simplified version of the table in which I should search:

+----+--------+------------+
|ID  | Title  | Description|
+----+--------+------------+
|1   | Title1 | Lorem ipsum|
+----+--------+------------+
|2   | Title2 | Dolor sit  |
+----+--------+------------+

and this string, written by the user in the search bar:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

I thought something like:

$string = mysqli_real_escape_string($_GET['string']);
$words = explode(' ', $string);
$count_words = count($words);

Then I have two options.

Select every row from the table and then check if the elements of the array $words are part of a field:

$description_array = explode(' ', $description); // I get this var from the query
for($i = 0; $i < $count_words; $i++) {

 if(in_array($words[$i]), $description_array) {
   // Something here
  }

}

Or maybe, is better something like:

for($i = 0; $i < $count_words, $i++) {
 $search_query = "SELECT * FROM 'table' WHERE 'title' = '". $words[$i] . "'";
}

Which is: Is it better to select everything first, and then check the data, or select only the rows which fit the string? Or, maybe, is there something like a standard way to write this script?

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 133

Answers (2)

jinchuika
jinchuika

Reputation: 333

Try with something like this instead:

$string = mysqli_real_escape_string(trim($_GET['string']));
$words = explode(' ', $string);

//Check if the user wrote more than a single word
if (count($words)>1) {
    //Then you can create only one query and then you can fetch the result of that
    //Implode the words
    $search_query = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE title='".implode("' OR title='", $words)."'";
}
else { //If the user wrote only one word
    $search_query = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE title='".$string."'";
}
echo $search_query;

You can try this at here

Upvotes: 1

Marko Šutija
Marko Šutija

Reputation: 375

You could use:

$wordsToSearch = array();

$string = mysqli_real_escape_string($_GET['string']);
$words = explode(' ', $string);

foreach($word as $val){
  $w = "`title` LIKE '%".$val."%' OR `description` LIKE '%".$val."%'";
  $wordsToSearch[] = $w;
}

$search_query = "SELECT * FROM 'table' WHERE ".implode("OR",$wordsToSearch);

I hope that this is useful for You.

Upvotes: 1

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