Question

I am trying to figure out why when I enter a dot (.) into my search, it highlights every single character of the search results (it wraps each character in a <span class="search-highlight"></span>) and it’s also only showing 3 tickets which is weird because all of them have at least one dot in them:

The query that does the actual searching (along with the variables) is:

$q = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['q']);
$query = trim(strtoupper($q));
$query = htmlentities($query, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$construct = $is_employee==false ? "user='$userid' AND" : "";
$tickets_result = mysql_query("SELECT `id`, `subject`, `message`, `timestamp`, `user` FROM `tickets` WHERE $construct (upper(subject) LIKE '%".$query."%' OR upper(message) LIKE '%".$query."%')") or trigger_error(mysql_error());

And my highlight class:

class highlight
    {
        public $output_text;

        function __construct($text, $words) {
            $split_words = explode(" ", $words);
            foreach ($split_words as $word) {
                $text = preg_replace("|($word)|Ui",
                        "<span class=\"search-highlight\">$1</span>", 
                        $text);
            }
            $this->output_text = $text;
        }
    }

Does anyone know why or how a simple dot (.) would cause this and is it possible to fix?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Answer 1

Just gotta add an alternative to escaped regular expression search here:

Perhaps what you want is a non-regex replace?

https://www.php.net/str_replace

str_replace — Replace all occurrences of the search string with the
replacement string

For an exact match, that makes the most sense to me…