PHP and mysql Ignoring the special chracters present in the database - php

Question

a little help on this one, here are its details
[Products]
id int
name text
category
color
Problem is the values of the color field, sample values are:
GOLDRED
GOLD-RED
GOLD/RED
BLUE/GREEN-RED
WHITE GOLD-YELLOW/ORANGE
I could very much clean the search query such as this sample using a basic function
"select * from products where color=".cleanstring($stringval)." limit 1";
function cleanstring($var) {
$newtext = $var;
$newtext = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $newtext);
$newtext = str_replace(" ", "", $newtext);
$newtext = strtoupper($newtext);
return $newtext;
}
The problem is with the content. It's thousands of records without any form of standard in using a naming convention.
I want to select those records with its values clean similar to my cleanstring().
Example:
Query = GOLDRED
Can select
GOLD-RED
GOLD RED
GOLDRED
GOLD/RED
GOLDRED
Any solution that you could recommend? Code is in PHP/MySQL.

Answer 1

"select * from products where 1".cleanstring($stringval);
function cleanstring($var) {
$color_list = array('GOLD','RED','GREEN','WHITE');
$sql_where='';
foreach( $color_list AS $v){
if(strpos($var, $v)!==false){
$sql_where .=" AND color LIKE '%{$v}%'";
}
}
return $sql_where;
}
//select * from products where 1 OR color LIKE '%GOLD%' OR color LIKE '%RED%'
REMARK:
input: GOLDRED ,
match: GOLD RED,GOLD-RED,GOLD/RED..... GOLD/RED/ABC,RED_GOLDGREEN,
may be after get all data , then make func ranking by match % ,like search engine

Answer 2

Probably You could make just a MySQL regexp with 'GOLD.?RED' or 'GOLD(-|[[:space:]])?RED' ?
That's an online example I made : http://regexr.com?34mmg

Answer 3

Not the best way, and I am sure has tons of downfalls, but if I did not make any mistakes in php code (don't have machine to try it out), it would do the work:
"select * from products where color REGEXP '".cleanstring($stringval)."' limit 1";
function cleanstring($var) {
$var = preg_replace('![-\/ ]+!', '', $var);
$strLength = strlen($var);
$parts = array();
for ($i = 1; $i <= $strLength; i++) {
$parts[] = ($i > 0) ? substr($var, 0, $i).'[-/ ]?'.substr($var, $i);
}
return "[[:<:]](".implode('|', $parts).")[[:>:]]";
}
It would output something like this:
"select * from products where color REGEXP '[[:<:]](G[-/ ]?OLDRED|GO[-/ ]?LDRED|GOL[-/ ]?DRED|GOLD[-/ ]?RED|GOLDR[-/ ]?ED|GOLDRE[-/ ]?D)[[:>:]]' limit 1"
which basically breaks your keyword in pieces letter by letter, i.e.
G OLDRED
GO LDRED
GOL DRED
GOLD RED
GOLDR ED
GOLDRE D
and do the "LIKE" statement on them but with smarter word boundaries and instead of just space, it considers "-" and "/" as well.