I have a $string variable, and I use
SELECT * FROM db WHERE description LIKE '%$string%' OR headline LIKE '%$string%'
As seen, I want to search the two fields "description" and "headline" to see if the string variable matches any of them.
Problem is that I want it to match whole words!!!
Ex: If description contains "hello", It is enough if $string is an 'h'. this is not what I want.It has to match the whole word only!
I split the querystring into words for this? or what?
If you want full word matching you should consider trying FULLTEXT searching. One prerequisite is that your table must be using the MyISAM engine:
CREATE TABLE test (
id INT(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
headline VARCHAR(120) NOT NULL,
description VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
FULLTEXT(headline, description)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;
You would query for matches like so:
SELECT *
FROM test
WHERE MATCH (headline,description) AGAINST('$string');
This has the added benefit of ordering your results by relevancy.
An alternative to full text searching, which may be sufficient, is to use a REGEXP function.
Your example query might then be:
SELECT *
FROM db
WHERE description REGEXP '[[:<:]]$string[[:>:]]' = 1
OR headline REGEXP '[[:<:]]$string[[:>:]]' = 1