Question

I need to compare 2 tables, where one has the data and the other one has the explanation.

So the data table looks like this:

id  | state | substate | stage | suppressed
001    wip     A1          B3        Y
003    wip     A1          B1        N
005    done    A2          B3        Y
009    wip     A1          B3        N
... and many more similar

The explanation table has to get the 4 states above (state, substate, stage, suppressed) and translates them to human readable:

state | substate | stage | suppressed | HRoutput1     | HRoutput2
wip        A1        B1        N        "it's ok"       "wait...dont do anything"
wip        A1        B3        N        "it's not ok"   "better call saul"
done       A2        B3        Y        "it's not ok"   "forget about it"
wip        A1        B1        Y        "it's ok"       "something minor needs to be done"
*          *         *         Y        "it's ok"       "it's suppressed"
done       *         *         *        "it's ok"       "it's being worked on"

Now see the above explanation table has 2 stages where i used wildcards in the table

*,*,*,Y,"it's ok","its suppressed"

This should be used when state, substate, stage and suppressed are not matched in any of the above criteria.

What I did until now is, I loaded each line on the data into an array A
then let the element array A run through the explanation table:

 "SELECT * from explanation_table where state = '" . $data['state'] ."' and '" . $data['substate'] . "' ....etc etc

Then ran the query and saved the result into an explanation array and printed the result

 $data['id'] .  $expl['HRoutput1'] .  $expl['HRoutput2']

My code worked fine except for the cases with wildcards.

Answer 1

To resume from your query, you could do:

"SELECT * from explanation_table where (state = '" . $data['state'] ."' OR state = '*') and (substate = '" . $data['substate'] . "' OR substate = '*') ....etc etc.... ORDER BY state != '*', substate != '*' ... LIMIT 1

This way, you’ll match both wildcards and exact state/substate/… matches, valueing the real matches higher than the wildcard matches (the order by) and returning only the best matching result.