Question

I’m trying to make a search form that displays data from my database where the name of the data is like the search term.
Sadly I’m trying to get it to echo information from multiple tables:

Album Table:

albumName      albumArt       artistID
----------    ----------      ---------
album1        art1.jpg        1
album2        art2.jpg        2
album3        art3.jpg        3

SongsTable:

songName      artistID       
--------      ---------       
song1         1          
song2         1         
song3         2         
song4         3         
song5         3         

Example PHP:

$search = $_POST['search'];    
$sql1 = "SELECT * FROM songs WHERE songName LIKE '%$search%'";    
$searchResult = mysql_query($sql1);    

while ($result = mysql_fetch_array($searchResult)) {
echo "<tr>
     <td>".$result['songName']."</td>
     <td>".$result['albumName']."</td>
     </tr>";
}
?>

I’m not sure if inner join will do the trick, I’ve read as many possible tutorials on this but none i can comprehend or use.

The search term is coming from an form on another page, this is just the processing page, but it also echos the information.

I need the query to return something similiar to below if someone searched ‘S’:

songName      albumname       artistName
----------    ----------      ---------
song1         album1          artist1
song2         album2          artist2
song3         album3          artist3

Answer 1

The most straightforward join I can imagine is this:

SELECT * FROM songs 
INNER JOIN albums USING (artistID)
WHERE songName LIKE '%$search%'

Btw, you should really escape your variables properly:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM songs 
    INNER JOIN albums USING (artistID)
    WHERE songName LIKE '%" . mysql_real_escape_string($search) . "%'";

And some characters have a meaning with LIKE, such as % and _; consider escaping those as well.

str_replace(
    array('%', '_'), 
    array('\%', '\_'), 
    mysql_real_escape_string($search)
)