Question

OK, I have a DB table that’s called players and each player has a forename and surname. Then I have a PHP Ajax search thing that I call to search for players. For example… in the input box, someone types James and there’s a row in the table with forename and surname James and Smith respetively.

I do this $check = mysql_query("SELECT * FROMplayersWHEREsurnameLIKE '%$name%' ORforenameLIKE '%$name%' LIMIT 0, 10") or die(mysql_error());

And it returns at least 10 with either forename or surname like the keyword James. However, if I type James Smith, despite it being in the table, I get zero results.

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Are you using InnoDB or MyISAM? If your using MyISAM, you can create a single field which holds the combined name and then search it using a full text index. So lets imagine you add a new field called combined_names you would search it like this

SELECT * FROM table WHERE match(combined_names) against('John Smith');

This would find any row with either John or Smith in, you can change it to match only those rows with both parts you would add plusses like so:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE match(combined_names) against('+John +Smith');

Here is the documentation on the MySQL site where you can find out more:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html