I have a form where users can search all the entries in a table and i'm having problems with a specific entry.
I'll give an example for a better understanding:
The user can check 5 boxes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and he checks all the boxes.
If the specific row has the value '1|2|3', my search query won't find it.
Beforehand i get the post variable in php (which is an array) and add '%' before and after every value. In this case: '%1%2%3%4%5%'
My search query:
SELECT id FROM table WHERE string LIKE '%1%2%3%4%5%'
In this case, it won't find the row with the value '1|2|3'.
I guess it's normal this way and it works great the other way around but I want to perform a query that matches parts of the original string. In my case '%1%2%3%4%5%' to match '1|2|3'.
How can i do this?
Thanks in advance for taking the time.
EDIT: Can i do this without multiple AND, OR operators?
just change it to this:
string LIKE '%1%'
OR
string LIKE '%2%'
OR
string LIKE '%3%'
...
this would solve your problem - but you should really think about normalizing your database (in this case, store 5 different flags as 1/0 for the five different settings instead of putting them all together in one field).
Before you find something sexier and more efficient, you can use:
SELECT id FROM table WHERE string LIKE '%1%' OR string LIKE '%2%' OR string LIKE '%3%' OR string LIKE '%4%' OR string LIKE '%5%'
I would say - dont use like, use substring or some similar function.
Related
I am working on a search function, where the matches are weighted based on certain conditions. One of the conditions I want to add weight to is matches where the character length of the query string in a LIKE match is longer than 4.
This is what I want to the query to look like, roughly. %s is meant to represent the actual match found by LIKE, but I don't think it does. I'm wondering if there is a special variable in MySQL that does represent the precise character match found by LIKE.
SELECT help.*,
IF(CHAR_LENGTH(%s) > 4, 2, 0) w
FROM help
WHERE (
(title LIKE '%this%' OR title LIKE '%testy%' OR title LIKE '%test%') OR
(content LIKE '%this%' OR content LIKE '%testy%' OR content LIKE '%test%')
) LIMIT 1000
edit: I could in the PHP split the search string array into two arrays based on the character length of the elements, with two separate queries that return different values for 'w', then combine the results, but I'd rather not do that, as it seems to me that would be awkward, messy, and slow.
Check out FULLTEXT as another way to discover rows. It will be faster, but won't address your question.
This probably has the effect you want.
SELECT ....
IF ( (title LIKE '%testy%' OR
content LIKE '%testy%'), 2, 0)
....
Note that the "match" in your LIKEs includes the %, so it is the entire length of the string. I don't think that is what you wanted.
REGEXP "(this|testy|that)" will match either 4 or 5 characters (in this example). It may be possible to do something with REGEXP_REPLACE to replace that with the empty string, then see how much it shrank.
I think the answer to my question is that what I wanted to do isn't possible. There is no special variable in MySQL representing the core character match in a WHERE condtional where LIKE is the operator. The match is the contents of the returned data row.
What I did to reach my objective was took the original dynamic list of search tokens, iterated through that list, and performed a search on each token, with the SQL tailored to the conditions that matched each token.
As I did this I built an array of the search results, using the id for the database row as the index for the array. This allowed me to perform calculations with the array elements, while avoiding duplicates.
I'm not posting the PHP code because the original question was about the SQL.
I'm trying to get around pulling all the data from a table, and cycling through it with php. Here's my current Query:
SELECT
*
FROM
ExampleTable
WHERE
StringContains LIKE "%lkjlkjsomeuser#example.comjkjhkjhkjhkjhk,mniu,mk,mkjh%"
ExampleTable.StringContains has values that look like 'someuser#example.com', 'someuser2#example.com', etc.
This doesn't match because LIKE only finds sub strings of the column value, not the other way around. Any ideas on commands to find rows where the table value is a substring of the passed string?
SELECT
*
FROM
ExampleTable
WHERE
'lkjlkjsomeuser#example.comjkjhkjhkjhkjhk,mniu,mk,mkjh' LIKE
CONCAT('%', StringContains, '%')
Try this:
SELECT *
FROM ExampleTable
WHERE "lkjlkjsomeuser#example.comjkjhkjhkjhkjhk,mniu,mk,mkjh" LIKE
CONCAT("%",StringContains,"%")
The key is to recognize that the column variable just represents a string, and the LIKE statement is always comparing two strings in the form
"stringA" LIKE '%stringB%'
Usually people use it to search for a "part" of a string contained in the "whole" database field string, but you can easily switch them. The only extra tool you need is the CONCAT statement, since you want the database field to be the part instead of the whole. The CONCAT statement builds a string with the %'s around the database field string, and the string form of the argument is now equivalent to
"stringB" LIKE "%stringA%"
Just make the LIKE in the opposit order. Since you have to add those % you'll have to concatenate the field first:
SELECT *
FROM ExampleTable
WHERE "lkjlkjsomeuser#example.comjkjhkjhkjhkjhk,mniu,mk,mkjh" LIKE CONCAT('%', StringContains, '%');
I have the following query :
SELECT * FROM `user`
WHERE MATCH (user_login) AGAINST ('supriya*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
Which outputs all the records starting with 'supriya'.
Now I want something that will find all the records ending with e.g. 'abc'.
I know that * cannot be preappended and it doesn't work either and I have searched a lot but couldn't find anything regarding this.
If I give query the string priya ..it should return all records ending with priya.
How do I do this?
Match doesn't work with starting wildcards, so matching with *abc* won't work. You will have to use LIKE to achieve this:
SELECT * FROM user WHERE user_login LIKE '%abc';
This will be very slow however.
If you really need to match for the ending of the string, and you have to do this often while the performance is killing you, a solution would be to create a separate column in which you reverse the strings, so you got:
user_login user_login_rev
xyzabc cbazyx
Then, instead of looking for '%abc', you can look for 'cba%' which is much faster if the column is indexed. And you can again use MATCH if you like to search for 'cba*'. You will just have to reverse the search string as well.
I believe the selection of FULL-TEXT Searching isn't relevant here. If you are interested in searching some fields based on wildcards like:
%word% ( word anywhere in the string)
word% ( starting with word)
%word ( ending with word)
best option is to use LIKE clause as GolezTrol has mentioned.
However, if you are interested in advanced/text based searching, FULL-TEXT search is the option.
Limitations with LIKE:
There are some limitations with this clause. Let suppose you use something like '%good' (anything ending with good). It may return irrelevant results like goods, goody.
So make sure you understand what you are doing and what is required.
I've to ask your help to solve this problem.
My website has a search field, let's say user writes in "Korg X 50"
In my database in table "products" i have a filed "name" that holds "X50" and a field "brand" that hold "Korg". Is there a way to use the UNION option to get the correct record ?
And if the user enters "Korg X-50" ?
Thank you very much !
Matteo
May be you should use full-text search
SELECT brand, name, MATCH (brand,name) AGAINST ('Korg X 50') AS score
FROM products WHERE MATCH (brand,name) AGAINST ('Korg X 50')
As far as I understand you don't need UNION but something like
SELECT * FROM table1
WHERE CONCAT(field1, field2) LIKE '%your_string%'
On client side you get rid of all characters (like space, hyphen, etc) in your_string that appears in user input and cannot be in field1 or field2.
So, user input Korg X 50 as well as Korg X-50 becomes KorgX50.
you will need to get some form of searchable text.
either parse out the input for multiple key words and match each separately, or perhaps try to append them all together and match to the columns appended in the same way.
you will also need either a regex, or maybe a simpler search and replace to get rid of spaces and dashes after the append before the comparison.
in general, allowing users to search for open ended text strings is more complicated than 'what union do i use'... you will ideally also be worried about slight misspellings and capitalization, and keyword order.
you may consider pulling all keywords out from your normal record into a separate keyword list associated with each product, then use that list to perform your searches.
If you do not want to parse user input and use as it is, then you will need to use a query like this
select * from products where concat_ws(' ',brand,name) = user_input -- or
select * from products where concat_ws(' ',brand,name) like %user_input%
However, this query won't return result if user enters name "Korg X-50" and your table contains "Korg" and "X50", then you need to do some other thing to achive this. You may look at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_soundex however it won't be a complete solution. Look for text indexing libraries for that ex: lucene
SELECT id, absolute_tag, tag FROM c7_storage_tags
WHERE users_id = 1
AND LOWER(absolute_tag) LIKE LOWER('##Pictures#zee\'s fav%')
This is not giving me the correct result, even thou i do have a row in my database with the correct string.
The better solution for me would be to figure out a way so that "##Pictures#zee\'s fav" string of mine, could be treated as just a string. And I can perform like on it.
How can I fix it.
Thanks in advance.
Zeeshan
IF you string has a backslash in it, you should escape it twice :
// value absolute_tag == "##Pictures#zee\'s fav"
select * from test where `absolute_tag` like '##Pictures#zee\\\\\'%'
From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-comparison-functions.html#operator_like
Your query should look like
SELECT id, absolute_tag, tag FROM c7_storage_tags
WHERE users_id = 1
AND LOWER(absolute_tag) LIKE LOWER('##Pictures#zee\\\\\'s fav%')
Your original query was looking for a record with absoulte_tags begins with "##Pictures#zee's fav"