PHP search wildcard?

[enhanced08]

I'm working with a database and have the option to select between 8ish different groups to search from. For example: CPU Speed, CPu Type, RAM, OS, etc. how would I set it up so that a user might select all items from a specific group? Like so he can select a 2.8 P4 and with any amount of ram or something.

Its like when your searching on a website and have a drop down menu and you can select "Any" or "All" from the menu and get everything. How do you do this?

thanks!

[catacon]

What is the field type for each of the section? Like is the CPU TEXT and the amount of Ram INT? You could try to make them all TEXT, so numbers and letters can go into the field. Then tou should be able to have the "All" option. Are you just going to be displaying somewhere, or what?

[enhanced08]

In the database or in the form? Everything is TEXT in the database. How do I use the "All" option? Yes, I want to have the data displayed on another page.

[blue60007]

Can't you just include "All" like any other menu item?

[enhanced08]

Thats what I want to do, but what do I set the value to so that it will include everything rather than search for the term "All".

[blue60007]

Oh...I think for MySQL DB's you want to use %

[enhanced08]

Ok, thats what I finally figured out after about 2 hours on google, but I can't get it to work. I think its because the way I am calling it in.

This is how its setup. I have a page with drop down menus and each option on the menu is assigned to a string, or whatever its called in PHP (i'm very new to it), and then sent to a search page when the data is searched for and displayed on screen. I set it up so that it would display what its searching for so I could tell if the right data was being passed. It shows that it is searching for the item "%" and not its wildcard value.

[blue60007]

OK, I think I see the problem. If you are setting All equal to "%" in say the variable $ram, then you do your query:

$query = "SELECT ram WHERE ram = '" . $ram ."';

Then what's happening is it's literally looking for '%'...

not sure how to go about fixing that, but I think that's what's happening

[enhanced08]

from selection page:

select name="Sram"
option value=% selected - RAM AMT - option

from search page:

$ query = "SELECT * FROM WU2 WHERE ram LIKE '$Sram' && client LIKE '$Sclient' && speed LIKE '$Sspeed'""

thats my code and yes, thats whats hapeneing. its looking for "%" rather than the wildcard value of it.

EDIT: i had to remove a few "< and >" so the text would show rather than the code running

[blue60007]

Have you tried something like this:

$query = "SELECT ram WHERE ram = '" . $ram ."';

I'm not really an expert at this, so...

[enhanced08]

nope, doesn't work...

should i keep option value=% or change it to something else?

EDIT: I know there is a way to do this because I have seen it done before as I'm sure you have as well.

[blue60007]

Have you tried searching by literally 'ram = %', and not using a variable?

[faulkner132]

You said you have everything in the database set as TEXT? The wildcard search probably will not work unless you are indexing the field. Change the field type to VARCHAR and it should work.

[mairving]

Need to modify things a bit.

PHP Code:

SELECT * from database_tablename
WHERE ram like="%$ram%" 


Example:
You are searching for the word 'them'. The above statement would find words like 'them', 'theme', 'anthem', if they existed in the field that you are searching.

Course pretty silly to have RAM as a text field when it is numeric.

[enhanced08]

Ok, I got it to work, it turns out that I do have it set as VARCHAR rather than TEXT, sorry about that.

Thanks for the help guys, I hope your good at this stuff, cause I know I'll be back with more problems and questions! lol thanks!