Question

I’m trying to write search function, that gets its parameter from the user and uses an SQL statement to get the result from a MySQL database.

The statement:

$title = $_GET['title'];    
$result = mysql_query("SELECT name, phone, email from person where name= '$title'");

The problem with this statement is that it’s only taking the exact name; if the user is looking for “David” and just types “Da” then no result will be found.

I need a statement that, when the user enters part of the name, displays all matches with “Da”.

Answer 1

You can try a wildcard search, which is not optimal, but should work:

$title = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['title']);
$result = mysql_query("SELECT name, phone, email from person where name like '$title%'");