Question

I have a PHP array of strings: ie: “Big green car parked outside”..etc

I would like to perform boolean search operations on these strings, similar to MySQL fulltext searching , or Sphinx Searching.

For example, I would like to find all strings containing word “green” but not “car”

Does anyone know of any existing PHP classes or libraries which would help me accomplish this ? Or can anyone suggest any google terms I could search for ?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

The PHP function array_filter() will do the trick here.

function greennotcar($v)
{
    if(strpos($v, " green ") === false)
        return false
    if(strpos($v, " car ") !== false)
        return false
    return true
}

$newarray = array_filter($array, "greennotcar");

This checks if the string contains green, if it doesn’t, exclude it from the array. Then, it checks if it contains car, if it does, exclude it. Otherwise, include it.

EDIT: I added spaces in the strings so you wouldn’t match cart as well as car, for example. This is all up to your own preference.