Hi everyone,

I have just built a search engine for a customer using php and mysql. It was all working fine until i am told by the customer that they required it to search differently which i am not sure on how to do.

Basically the search engine finds computer games cheats against a mysql database, at this moment it time the query looks something like this:

SELECT * FROM games WHERE game_title LIKE '%" . $q . "%'

Which will return the results the user is searching for but the customer is asking that if $q was a single charater, e.g "A". They require that cheats only by the letter "A" would be returned.

I hope someone here would be able to give me some advice on how to fix this problem.

Thanks
Wayne

You'd probably want to just use some simple PHP logic to determine if it's a single character request. Then just remove (or never add) the first %.

pretty much what error404 said: do something like:


if (strlen($q) > 1) {
mysql_query("SELECT * FROM games WHERE game_title LIKE '%" . $q . "%'");
} else {
mysql_query("SELECT * FROM games WHERE game_title LIKE '" . $q . "%'");
}

Thankyou everyone i knew it was something simple, i have just never done it like that before. Search page is all up and running now thanks to you guys and girls!

Wayne