Question

I am working on an assignment right now where I am trying to build a small real estate like website that builds a search from my mySQL database based on a user input city. I have it working right now to give back correct results based on if the user inputs the city exactly right, but I want it to be able to return searches if the user was to enter just part of the city.

An example is that some of the cities in the assignment are “Tomsville” and “OceanCove” I need to be able to have the search be able to return results for “Tomsville” if someone were to just input “Tom” or even “T”…the same needs to be true for “OceanCove” where they could input “ocean” and get the results.

The variable for the user input is $findhome.

Here is the part of my code relevant to this question:

 $statement  = "SELECT *";
 $statement .= "FROM u1585_homes ";

if ($findhome!= 'ALL')
{
    $statement .= "WHERE city ='".$findhome."' ";
}
    $statement .= "ORDER BY city";

    $sqlResults = selectResults($statement);

    $error_or_rows = $sqlResults[0];

    if (substr($error_or_rows, 0 , 5) == 'ERROR')
    {
        print "<br />Error on DB";
        print $error_or_rows;
        } else {

                $arraySize = $error_or_rows;

                for ($i=1; $i <= $error_or_rows; $i++)
                {
                    $image_file = $sqlResults[$i]['image_file'];
                    $city = $sqlResults[$i]['city'];
                    $price = $sqlResults[$i]['price'];
                    $bedrooms= $sqlResults[$i]['bedrooms'];
                    $baths= $sqlResults[$i]['baths'];
                    $footage = $sqlResults[$i]['footage'];
                    $realtor_firstname = $sqlResults[$i]['realtor_firstname'];
                    $realtor_lastname = $sqlResults[$i]['realtor_lastname'];
                    $grabber = $sqlResults[$i]['grabber'];
                    $description = $sqlResults[$i]['description'];

                    print "<p><img src='images/".$image_file."'>";
                    print "<h3>".$grabber."</h3><br />";
                    print "City: ".$city."<br />";
                    print "Bedrooms: ".$bedrooms."<br />";
                    print "Baths: ".$baths."<br />";
                    print "Price: ".$price."<br />";
                    print "Footage: ".$footage."<br />";
                    print "Realtor: $realtor_firstname ".$realtor_lastname."<br />";

                    print "Description: ".$description;
                    //print ""
                }               
        }
    }

Answer 1

Try using % around the search terms and using like instead of = as the operator:

$statement .= "WHERE city like '%".$findhome."%' ";