Question

The way this is set up, it will pull up results for multiple words in the $term variable.
I want it to pull up results that only match all words inside the $term span between main, secondary, sub columns.

Right now if $term is: “Hello World” it will pull results from the database:

id  | main               | secondary      | sub

01  | statements         | hello world    | blah
02  | hello              | what's up?     | anything here
03  | life rocks         | worldwide web  | anything else here
04  | where in the world | she said hello | bleh

When what I would like is only results 01 and 04 to pull up because they include the full $term of Hello And World

Here’s my code. I’ve tried searching on here, and in Google. But in truth I don’t know what to look for. All I’ve found are full text searching documents, which I’m already doing here. I haven’t found any to say how to pull the exact result. (The sprintf is there because I guess I need that to be able to return it in a JSON response?

$query = sprintf("SELECT id, main, secondary, sub, 
    MATCH(main, secondary, sub) AGAINST('". $term ."' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS score 
    FROM list_genres 
    WHERE MATCH (main, secondary, sub) AGAINST('". $term ."' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
    ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 15");

Answer 1

Your sentece is wrong, first sprintf() should receive as parameters, the terms, and use %s wherever you want to add it to the sql, also for multiple words you need to add a + for each word.

The code should be something like this:

$term = '+' . str_replace(' ',' +',$term); // Remove this line if you don't want search multiple terms
$query = sprintf("SELECT id,main,secondary,sub, MATCH(main, secondary, sub) AGAINST('&s' IN BOOLEAN MODE) as score 
    FROM list_genres WHERE MATCH (main, secondary, sub) AGAINST('%s' IN BOOLEAN MODE) 
    ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 15", $term, $term);