AvengeX Webmaster Development - Free PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML, Photoshop Tutorials

Searching with PHP and MySQL is pretty easy when you think about it, especially if you're doing it the simple way (without boolean or whatever)

It consists of a few forms, a query and an output. As I said, simple!

First of all, we start off with our form code.


<form name="form1" id="form1" method="post" action="">
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2">

<tr> <td style="text-align: center;">
      <input
name="search" type="text" id="search" />

      </td>

</tr>
<tr>

<td style="text-align: center;">

      <input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" value="Search!" />

      </td>

</tr>

</table>

</form>



The form that you just made contains a text input that people will type into, the next code will extract the form data and then search it..

Form processing

$search = htmlspecialchars(addslashes($_POST['search']), ENT_QUOTES);

if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
if(!$search) {
echo "No search entered, please go back and fill in the fields properly.";
}

else {
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE '%$search%'");
$resultnum = mysql_num_rows($query); // Just print $resultnum if you want to show how many results returned
if($resultnum>0) { // Echos out matches if anything was found
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($query)) { // Starts spitting out the data

echo "You can put a link to the result article here, or something else. This is what'll show up when a user gets a result, for each result.

}
}
}
}
else {
echo "<p>No search entered?</p>";
}

And that's it. Let me just break this down for you -
htmlspecialchars(addslashes:
This line does two things; it cleans out any chance of an SQL injection to your database, and then it adds slashes to the value which makes the search more accurate. If you don't add slashes, then if you searched for cheese, it would return anything with a c, h, e or s in your database. So much for search relavance, eh?

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE '%$search%'"):

This is the query that does the search. Notice the percentage signs in the LIKE part - don't forget these. They work as wildcards.

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