I'm working on trying to figure out how to show a search result from closest match to least closest.
Let's assume this is the multidimensional array of results. You will notice that there are arrays with the same "id", but have different "categories". I'm pretending this is a one-to-many relationship. So I'm assuming, for 1 "id", a user might have tagged it to 3 different relevant categories.
$results[] = array(
'id' => 1 ,
'text' => 'this is my first post',
'category' => 'blue'
);
$results[] = array(
'id' => 1 ,
'text' => 'this is my first post',
'category' => 'green'
);
$results[] = array(
'id' => 1 ,
'text' => 'this is my first post',
'category' => 'purple'
);
$results[] = array(
'id' => 2 ,
'text' => 'this is my second post',
'category' => 'blue'
);
$results[] = array(
'id' => 2 ,
'text' => 'this is my second post',
'category' => 'green'
);
Now, let's assume there are criteria that the user selected. I'll show it in array form:
$criterias = array('blue', 'green', 'purple');
Using this example, that means the $results "id" of 1 should show up first, and I want to show it's "text". This is because it scored 3 out of 3 (based on matching the criteria that was set in $criterias). Then following this logic the $results "id" of 2 should show up second because it only scored a 2 out of 3.
The final form what what I'm looking to do is be able to echo out the "text" value from highest score to lowest.
My level of programming in PHP is intermediate, so if you could please demonstrate a less complex solution that an intermediate could understand that would be great.
What I tried and didn't get to work was trying to first try to score it and put it into another multidimensional array and sort it, then echo it, but I couldn't get it to work.