Question

How can I search for the first 500 character, not including html tag?

Below is I came up with so far, which is searching for a keyword that occurs in a text,

    SELECT *
    FROM root_pages

    WHERE root_pages.pg_cat_id = '2'
    AND root_pages.parent_id != root_pages.pg_id
    AND root_pages.pg_hide != '1'
    AND root_pages.pg_url != 'cms'
    AND root_pages.pg_content_1 REGEXP '[[:<:]]".$search."[[:>:]]'
    OR root_pages.pg_content_2 REGEXP '[[:<:]]".$search."[[:>:]]'

ORDER BY root_pages.pg_created DESC

How can I add more conditions into it – first 500 letters that don’t include html tag?

It would be perfect if it can search the keyword on the first paragraph only – is it possible?

edit:

thanks for the help guys! this is my solution:

    # query to search for “whole word match” in SQL only, e.g. when I search for "rid", it should not match "arid", but it should match "a rid".
    # you can use REGEXP and the [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] word-boundary markers:
    $sql = "
    SELECT *
    FROM root_pages

    WHERE root_pages.pg_cat_id = '2'
    AND root_pages.parent_id != root_pages.pg_id
    AND root_pages.pg_hide != '1'
    AND root_pages.pg_url != 'cms'
    AND root_pages.pg_content_1 REGEXP '[[:<:]]".$search."[[:>:]]'
    OR root_pages.pg_content_2 REGEXP '[[:<:]]".$search."[[:>:]]'

    ORDER BY root_pages.pg_created DESC
    ";

    # use the instantiated db connection object from the init.php, to process the query
    $items = $connection -> fetch_all($sql);
    $total_item = $connection -> num_rows($sql);

    if ($total_item > 0)
    {
        foreach($items as $item)
        {
            # get the content
            if(empty($item['pg_content_2'])) $pg_content = strip_tags($item['pg_content_1']);
                else $pg_content = strip_tags($item['pg_content_2']);

            # get the first 500 letters only
            $pg_content = substr($pg_content, 0, 500);

            # get the matches
            if (preg_match("/\b(".$search.")\b/", $pg_content)) 
            {
                $match[] = $pg_content;
            }

        }

        $total_match = count($match);
        //echo $count;
    }

    if($total_match > 0)
    {
        echo '<result message="'.$total_match.' matches found! Please wait while redirecting." search="'.$search.'"/>';
    }
    else
    {
        echo '<error elementid="input" message="Sorry no results are found."/>';
    }

Answer 1

For:

How can I add more conditions into it

• first 500 letters that don’t include html tag?

You can’t do this with MySQL only (at least for a solution that will works in 100% of the cases) – see Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way and this SO answer for more details.

PHP strip_tags and substr would help to achieve what you want.