Question

I am working with a legacy PHP framework and am coming across some strange behavior that I can’t track down.

I’m running a query that looks something like this

select * from table where column like '%word-anotherword%'

, which I would like to return records from table where column contains the text “word-anotherword”. (column is a longtext field).

When I run this query in phpMyAdmin, I get the expected results. But when I run it from inside our framework, I get no results. I have run it in a separate .php file, using mysql_link, mysql_query to run the query, and that also behaves as expected.

When I echo out the query in the framework directly before it is passed to mysql_query, it is formatted just the same as I expect. I.E. our framework is not escaping it in some unexpected manner.

I am assuming that our framework is overriding some PHP setting somewhere to cause this difference in behavior, but I have had no luck googling for what it might be. I found this article, which seemed to be a good start, but also didn’t quite seem to fit what I’m seeing, since I am getting different behaviors on the same MySQL setup.

Any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

As a debugging heads-up:

When you echo your query out, you might want to make sure you’re actually seeing the data – e.g. if you’re echo-ing onto a webpage, make sure you’re applying htmlspecialchars() to the string. Otherwise you might not spot some changes.