PHP Advanced Search - php

Question

I am currently making a website where I require a very advanced search engine. I want the users to be able to say Person # company or Product # Category. How would I detect the # sign or any special characters, filter them out and make individual variables based on the returned string. So $a = Person and $b = company.

Answer 1

You can use explode() to split a string:
$items = explode('#', 'Person # Company', 2);
if(count($items) === 2) {
// Person # Company
$person = trim($items[0]);
$company = trim($items[1]);
// Do your searching here...
} else {
// Search normally, not Person # Company.
}

Answer 2

Send it across as a get request formatted as a=Person&b=company etc. The other way is exactly what you said, loop through the string and examine the chars one by one. When you encounter an # sign you know that the letters before it (not including spaces) are the value of a and everything after the # (not including spaces) is the value of b.
Sorry I tried to be as clear as I could.

Answer 3

This is very simple to achieve;
function searchForPersonAtCompany($searchQuery) {
global $db;
$queryComponents = explode('#', $searchQuery, 2);
if (count($queryComponents) != 2) {
// '#' was not specified in the search query, return an empty array.
return array();
}
$person = $queryComponents[0];
$company = $queryComponents[1];
$sql = 'SELECT p.id AS personId, c.id AS companyId FROM people p JOIN companies c ON p.company = c.id WHERE p.name LIKE :person AND c.name LIKE :company';
$stmt = $db->prepare($sql);
$stmt->bindValue(':person', $person);
$stmt->bindValue(':company', $company);
$stmt->execute();
return $stmt->fetchAll();
}
You didn't specify your database schema, so I had to guess that you have a people table and a companies table, with people related to the companys table with the company field.
Table: People
id | name | company
--------------------------------------------
1 | Alice | 1
2 | Bob | 1
3 | Charles | 2
Table: Companies
id | name
--------------------------------------------
1 | Company A
2 | Company B
You will have to adapt the code for your purposes, but using my testing data, the following should work;
searchForPersonAtCompany('Alice#Company A');
searchForPersonAtCompany('Charles#Company B');
Notes:
This is a very simple implementation of your search, you might be better looking into a database based search engine which can handle more complicated queries for the future.
I have used PDO as the connection to my database (bindValue, exec, etc), you might be using something different. :person and :company are just variables in the SQL.