Question

I’ve got a field in my table for tags on some content, separated by spaces, and at the moment I’m using:

SELECT * FROM content WHERE tags LIKE '%$selectedtag%'"

But if the selected tag is elephant, it will select content tagged with bigelephant and elephantblah etc…

How do I get it to just select what I want precisely?

Answer 1

SELECT * FROM content WHERE tags RLIKE '[[:<:]]elephant[[:>:]]'

If your table is MyISAM, you can use this:

SELECT * FROM content WHERE MATCH(tags) AGAINST ('+elephant' IN BOOLEAN MODE)

, which can be drastically improved by creating a FULLTEXT index on it:

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ix_content_tags ON content (tags)

, but will work even without the index.

For this to work, you should adjust @@ft_min_wold_len to index tags less than 4 characters long if you have any.