stopping duplicate urls in a form submission - php

Question

I have a community site, where people can put up pages, and the url generates from their name. e.g. My Business, becomes my-business. I want to create a way, that if there is another My Business, it will check and make the url my-business-2, my-business-3, etc.
function check_url($url) {
$qry = mysqli_query($this->con, "SELECT * FROM businesses WHERE url LIKE '$url%'");
if(mysqli_num_rows($qry)>0) {
$slugs = array();
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($qry)) $slugs[] = $row['url'];
if(in_array($url, $slugs)) {
$max = 1;
while(in_array(($url . '-' . ++$max ), $slugs)) $url .= '-' . $max;
}
}
return $url;
}
This is my function, but this still wont work, as if there is a business called My Bus, it will make it my-bus-2, when it would have been unique at my-bus. I have experimented with other functions too, but this one is the closest I got. Can anyone tell me one that works perfectly?

Answer 1

So form my understanding, you are trying to avoid inserting/generating duplicate URL. Output will be something like this -
www.example.com/my-business
www.example.com/my-business-1
www.example.com/my-business-2
www.example.com/my-business-3
...
Try using this function -
function check_url($base_url, $new_url='', $num=0) {
if($new_url == '') {
$new_url = $base_url;
}
$qry = mysqli_query($this->con, "SELECT * FROM businesses WHERE url = '$new_url'");
if(mysqli_num_rows($qry) > 0) {
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($qry)) {
$num++;
check_url($base_url, $base_url . '-' . $num, $num);
}
}
return $url;
}
Basically, this function will check the database until it finds a valid URL. Each time it will increment the number and recursively call the same function to generate new/valid URL.
Simple and basic!

Answer 2

#SpritsDracula has working code, but his function will query your database each time it executes. That being said, the recursion is a nice concept. Here is a piece of code that will save your the multiple database calls.
function check_url($url) {
$qry = mysqli_query($this->con, "SELECT * FROM businesses WHERE url LIKE '$url%'");
if(mysqli_num_rows($qry)>0) {
$baseUrl = $url;
$slugs = [];
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($qry)) $slugs[] = $row['url'];
$max = 1;
while(in_array($url, $slugs)) {
$url = $baseUrl . "-" . $max++;
}
}
return $url;
}