Question

I have a script:

$friendnotes = mysql_query("SELECT nid,user,subject,message FROM friendnote 
WHERE tousers LIKE '%$userinfo[username]%' ");

And the content in the “tousers” table of the database:

Test 
Example 
User

That script appears to be working well

However, if there is a user called “Test2”, it would also display content that has “Test2” in the database where $userinfo[username] is just “Test”

Is there any way to fix that problem? For example (this is just an example, I don’t mind if you give another way) make it so that it searches whole lines?

EDIT: I don’t think anyone understands, the “tousers” table contains multiple values (seperated by line) not just one, I want it to search each LINE (or anything that works similiar), not row

Answer 1

The condition

tousers LIKE '%Test%'

means that touser contains “Test” at some point, so it is true for “Test”,”MyTest”,”Test3″,”MyTest3″, and so on.

If you want only to match the current user, try

... WHERE tousers = '$userinfo[username]'

EDIT If you really want to store multiple names in one column (separated by newlines), you could use a REGEXP pattern like

WHERE tousers REGEXP '(^|\\n)($userinfo[username])($|\\n)'

Be aware to make sure that $userinfo[username] does not contain any regular-expression-like characters (‘$’, ‘^’, ‘|’, ‘(‘, etc.). Also (as mentioned in the comments above) this solution is suboptimal in terms of security/performance/etc: It would be better to model an 1:n-Relationship between the friendnote table and some friendnotes_user table …