Question

I have a table in a MySQL Database which has this structure:

CREATE TABLE `papers` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`title` varchar(1000) COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
`booktitle` varchar(300) COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
`journal` varchar(300) COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
FULLTEXT KEY `title_fulltext` (`title`),
FULLTEXT KEY `booktitle_fulltext` (`booktitle`),
FULLTEXT KEY `journal_fulltext` (`journal`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1601769 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin

Now I know that in the column title, somewhere within the millions of rows, there is a row which contains the string

nFOIL: Integrating Naïve Bayes and FOIL.

I want to look for

my_string = "nFOIL: integrating Naïve Bayes and FOIL"

and find the right row. You see it has to be a case insensitive search and the dot at the end is missing in the query. How do I implement this?

I tried

SELECT id FROM papers WHERE UPPER(title) LIKE %s

and converted my_string to upper case in python and put a “%” at the end of my_string but this doesn’t seam a good way of handling this. It did not work too. =)

Thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

I see you have added FULLTEXT indexes, I though you already knew about MATCH AGAINST syntax of MySQL.

You should try

SELECT id FROM papers 
WHERE MATCH (title,booktitle,journal) AGAINST ('nFOIL: integrating Naïve Bayes and FOIL' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE WITH QUERY EXPANSION);