Question

I’ve been asked to add a small AJAX feature to a clients site. Basically I have a MySQL table with 3 fields:

• id
• product
• name

The idea of the site is that the user starts typing the “name”, and the products show up after a couple of keystrokes. My query looks like this:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT product FROM mytable WHERE name LIKE '%".$search."%'");

Everything works, except when there is a space in the “name”. For example, if I have a name called “Coca Cola”, the script successfully lists the product when I type “Coca”, but as soon as I type the space, it no longer returns any rows.

I’ve searched everywhere for a solution. I understand that the space is interpreted as a separator of some kind, but can I get the database to interpret the space as … well … a space? If not, is there a better way of doing what I want to accomplish?

EDIT:

I ran it in PHPMyAdmin and it actually returns the correct results, which leads me to believe that it must be something in the PHP. Theres the full script:

$search = $_GET['search'];
$already_echoed = array();

if (!ereg('[^A-Za-z0-9]', $search) && strlen($search) > 2) {

 $query = mysql_query("SELECT product FROM mytable WHERE name LIKE '%".$search."%'");

 if (mysql_num_rows($query) > 0) {

  echo '<h4>Suggestions:</h4><ul>';

  while ($product = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

   if (!in_array($product['product'], $already_echoed)) {
    $getProduct = mysql_query("SELECT name, shortname FROM products WHERE id='".$product['product']."'");
    $product2 = mysql_fetch_array($getProduct);

    echo '<li><a href="http://' . $product2['shortname'] . '.mydomain.com">' . $product2['name'] . '</a></li>';
    $already_echoed[] = $product['product'];
   }

  }

  echo '</ul>';

 }


}

Answer 1

!ereg('[^A-Za-z0-9]', $search

Looks like you’re excluding spaces from the allowed list of characters. I don’t speak much PHP and can’t be arsed to go look at the docs.