can soundex be used on portion of a column in mysql? - php

Question

Is it possible to use soundex to compare portion of a column with search term? For example if a user searches "fiftythree" - it will find "Nirve Sports Fifty-Three Cruiser in Gold Metallic". I tried combining soundex with locate function but got an error. Here is my php code:
$soundex = soundex($keyword);
$soundexPrefix = substr($soundex, 0, 2);
$sql = "SELECT name ".
"FROM products WHERE SOUNDEX(LOCATE('$keyword', name)) LIKE '%$soundexPrefix%'";

Answer 1

You'll need to break up each word and do the SOUNDEX comparison, which is exactly what this function I'm going to tell you about does.
Using the function
Example usage: SELECT p.name FROM products p WHERE soundex_match('fiftythree', p.name, ' ')
It takes 3 arguments:
needle: The word you are looking for
haysack: The string of words among which you are searching
splitChar: The whitespace charater that’ll split the string into
single words. Generally it is the space(‘ ‘)
If any word in haystack sounds similar to needle, the function will return 1 and 0 otherwise.
Creating the function in your database
So go into your database (phpMyAdmin or the command line) and execute this, you only need to do it this one time):
drop function if exists soundex_match;
delimiter $$
create function soundex_match (needle varchar(128), haystack text, splitChar varchar(1)) returns tinyint
deterministic
begin
declare spacePos int;
declare searchLen int default length(haystack);
declare curWord varchar(128) default '';
declare tempStr text default haystack;
declare tmp text default '';
declare soundx1 varchar(64) default soundex(needle);
declare soundx2 varchar(64) default '';
set spacePos = locate(splitChar, tempStr);
while searchLen > 0 do
if spacePos = 0 then
set tmp = tempStr;
select soundex(tmp) into soundx2;
if soundx1 = soundx2 then
return 1;
else
return 0;
end if;
end if;
if spacePos != 0 then
set tmp = substr(tempStr, 1, spacePos-1);
set soundx2 = soundex(tmp);
if soundx1 = soundx2 then
return 1;
end if;
set tempStr = substr(tempStr, spacePos+1);
set searchLen = length(tempStr);
end if;
set spacePos = locate(splitChar, tempStr);
end while;
return 0;
end
$$
delimiter ;
http://www.imranulhoque.com/mysql/mysql-function-soundex-match-multi-word-string/