Question

I was working on a search form that stores people’s names in an array, and then wanted to create a query on the results page in PHP that uses an IN clause (if that’s the best way; feel free to point me in another direction). Basically the page has checkboxes for all the names, so they can check one, many or all names. I tried using the implode function, but have been unsuccessful so far.

$yourName = implode("', '", $_POST['Your_name']);

if($dutyReq=="All" && $yourName!="All" ) $query="SELECT * FROM talent_eas WHERE Your_name IN ('$yourName')";

Does that look at all right? Would that handle all scenarios? I’m just starting out with PHP so I have no idea what I’m doing. I tried searching for my specific question but just didn’t seem to see much use of the IN clause.

Answer 1

Yes, that how to use IN. Here are some more examples:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name IN ('John','Jane');

SELECT * FROM some_table WHERE the_month IN ('January','April','September');

Also, please read on SQL Injections.

For your comment:

You need to use mysql_real_escape_string BEFORE the implode. So your code should be:

$yourName = implode("', '", mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['Your_name']));