Question

I’m trying to search two fields as one from a MySQL database using PHP.

e.g.

mysql_query("
  SELECT (first_name,last_name) As name
  FROM people
  WHERE (name LIKE '%" . $term . "%')
");

I thought that this was the code to use, but to no avail. It has been a while since I’ve done this and I can’t remember exactly how to achieve the desired result.

Answer 1

You’re looking for the CONCAT function.

mysql_query("SELECT CONCAT(first_name, last_name) As name FROM people WHERE (CONCAT(first_name, last_name) LIKE '%" . $term . "%')");

or even…

mysql_query("SELECT CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) As name FROM people WHERE (CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) LIKE '%" . $term . "%')");

I couldn’t explain you the reasons behind this (…but maybe someone can leave a comment?), but you can’t use the name alias to search for both fields, you have to explicitly CONCAT again.