Question

I have a site that offers a keyword search. The user can perform a search by either selecting from a set of pre-defined keywords displayed as hyperlinks or utilize a search form on the same page.

When the user searches for Russian Blue Cat, the following is added to the page URL:

If using the pre-defined hyperlink search term, then ?keywords=Russian%20Blue%20Cat is added to the URL as follows:

  http://mydomain.com/index.php?keywords=Russian%20Blue%20Cat

If using the search form, then ?keywords=Russian+Blue+Cat is added to the URL as follows:

 http://mydomain.com/index.php?keywords=russian+blue+cat

The following $_GET line of code is placed within two PHP files, the original index.php file that contain both the pre-defined hyperlink search terms and the search form and another PHP file called process.php that utilizes the keywords for another process.

  if(empty($_GET['keywords'])){$keywords = '';} else {$keywords = $_GET['keywords'];}

The above $_GET line of code contained within the index.php file works properly and retrieves all three keywords. In this case the words Russian Blue Cat is retrieved.

The above $_GET line of code contained within the process.php file does not work properly and only retrieves the first of the three keywords. In this case only the word Russian is retrieved.

Is there a simple or proper way to fix this such that all keywords are retrieved properly?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Check for the string ‘%20’ and if present, explode by ‘%20’. Otherwise, check for the presence of a plus sign and explode by it instead.

This method is agnostic of the differing input format from the two sources entering the same script.

The caveat is that the string ‘%20’ or the character ‘+’ cannot occur inside a word in the other format or you will get unusual behavior.

$keyword = array();
if(stripos($keywords,"%20")) {
    $keyword = explode("%20",$keywords);
}
else if(stripos($keywords,"+")) {
    $keyword = explode("+",$keywords);
}

‘$keyword’ will then contain your keywords in an array.