Question

I am making a simple php file for matching the string entered by the user which searching for a group which suits him.
I need to display 5 records from the database which match the string to the maximum extent.
I also tried soundex() function in php and mysql.
I am now trying to design a regex pattern matcher for this purpose.
Can anyone suggest me a sample regex pattern for this purpose?
Is there any other way which can be implemented easily and is not too complex/time consuming.
I tried doing this with code using a distance algorithm
Want I is basically
Eg user types in “dps”

The php should retrieve thos

<?php
function minimum($a,$b,$c)
{
    if($a>$b)
    {
        if($a>$c)
        {
            return $a;
        }
        else
        {
            return $c;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        if($b>$c)
        return $b;
        else
        return $c;
    }
}
function Distance($s ,   $t)
{

  $m=strlen($s);
  $n=strlen($t);
  $d[]=array();
for( $i=0;$i<$m;$i++)
{

    for($j=0;$j<$n;$j++)
    {

        $d[$i][$j]=0;

    }

}

for ( $i=0; $i<$m;$i++)
  {
    $d[$i][0] = $i;
  }
for( $j=0;$j<$n;$j++)
  {
    $d[0][$j] = $j;
  }

  for ($j=1;$j<$n;$j++)
  {
    for ($i=1;$i<$m;$i++)
    {
      if ($s[$i] ==$t[$j])
        $d[$i][$j] =$d[$i][$j];       // no operation required
      else
        $d[$i][ $j] = minimum
                   (
                     $d[$i-1][ $j] + 1,
                     $d[$i] [$j-1] + 1,
                     $d[$i-1][ $j-1] + 1
                   );
    }
  }

  return $d[$m-1][$n-1];

}

?>`

Answer 1

Well there are many methods to achieve that :

• You could try Levenshtein : http://php.net/manual/en/function.levenshtein.php which is used to calculate the distance between two strings
• Considering regexp, you will encounter troubles if you can have different string lengths…
• Another option would be to consider ElasticSearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/) or Solr(http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) if you have a lot of text data, this might turn out to be the best option