Question

I currently have this table.

Names

Two fields, ID and Names. Example data would be 1 | Harry.

Now what i am planning on doing is that if someone enters in something like Henry in my form, it will search my database for a result that begins with “H” Then if their are multiple results, it will see if there are any results that are “He” if their isn’t it will fallback to the previous result from “H”.

The only thing i can think of doing is this,

$inputted_name = "Henry";
$query = mysql_query("SELECT `name` FROM `names`");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){
    $stored_name = $row['name'];
    if($stored_name[0] == $inputted_name[0]){
        if($stored_name[1] == $inputted_name[1]){
            $result = $stored_name;
            break;
        }   else   {
            // continue looking but then return the first result that matched one letter?
        }
    }
}

Now i am sure this can’t be the best way to do it. Would it be possible in a query? I’m just really not sure where to look for a sensible answer for this one.

Answer 1

change
mysql_query(“SELECT name FROM names“);

to
mysql_query(“SELECT name FROM names WHERE NAME='”.$inputted_name.”‘”);

and check you have more than one answer.

Note this is a bad way to do it if your name comes from a non controlled source, such as a web page, as it would allow a SQL injection, and then you would need parameters, but for your example it would work.

Edit: Now I read your question again, yes, you would need parameters or escaping such as:

$name = mysql_real_escape_string($inputted_name);
mysql_query("SELECT `name` FROM `names` WHERE NAME='".$=name."'");

Also, don’t try and do in code what the database can do easily (like search for characters). Your code is almost always going to be worse than the database for doing a search, leave it to the database.