Question

I’m bulding a search function for my web site and wish to search by two columns: title and author.

Query:

SELECT title, bookID, publisher, pubDate, book_image, books.authorID, authors.author FROM books, authors WHERE books.authorID = authors.authorID 
            AND title LIKE '$queryString%' OR author LIKE '$queryString%'LIMIT 5

When I search by title this works fine, but when I search by author I get a list of all books with the searched for author as author. Obviously this is incorrect.

How can I fix this query to successfully search for either title or author?

Answer 1

Try below :

SELECT title, bookID, publisher, pubDate, book_image, books.authorID, authors.author 
FROM books left join  authors on  books.authorID = authors.authorID 
WHERE (title LIKE '$queryString%' OR author LIKE '$queryString%') LIMIT 5

I would like to suggest you to use fulltext search in mysql.That will be more faster and efficient