How do I search substrings using PHP for items in a MySQL table? Right now my code only returns results if the entire string is inputted in the search field.

Thansk

It depends on where you want to do the search. If you want to check for a substring in PHP, use the substr() function.

If you want to perform the search in SQL, there are a variety of SQL functions to be used. Go here to see all the functions for string searching the MySQL supports. Right off hand I see INSTR() and LOCATE() would probably do the job you want.

or, if your searching for keywords in the text field of a mysql table, use this;

SELECT blah FROM blah_table WHERE keywords LIKE "%search_word%"

So basically this is a search page. I have a bunch of products in a MySQL table and I need the script to search names of the products in the table and display it on the page. However since the product names have like dashes and () and stuff like that (biochem stuff :/) inputting an exact search of the product name will be very time consuming for the user/hard to get accurate. Thus I need the search script to be able to take in the users search term and look through the mysql table for any entry with the search term included anywhere in the name.

you may read a value from a table and parse it... there are a lot of functions in php to do this - you may use standard, or a function for work with regular expressions... all is as Krynt said

My directory script does this;

Take in input in a text field, allows - (minus) to show you don't want that term included;

PHP Code:

<?
$words = explode(" ", strtolower($_GET['query']));

$sql = "";

foreach($words as $key=>$value) {
  if($value{0}=='-') { $sql .= " AND product_title NOT LIKE '%".substr($value,1,strlen($value))."%'"; }
  else { $sql .= " AND product_title LIKE '%$value%'"; }
}
?>

so you can tag $sql onto your query to search. Thus, a search for "tube" would match

"test-tubes"
fake test-tubes"

but a search for "tube -fake" would only match

"test-tubes"

That help at all?

An even cleaner and more effiecent search method if you have mysql 4.1+ is full text searching.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Search.html

Thanks for the help everyone. I'll try the different methods and see what works best.