Question

This one is killing me,i’m a total noob with regex.
Im trying to make a site search and compare the entered text with the titles column in the
database.
Basically what i want to accomplish with regex is LIKE ‘%word1 word2 word3%’ , but with some string variatons.

For example :

SELECT * FROM table WHERE title REGEXP
‘w[ao]rd’

works just fine. It looks for word and ward. But when i want multiple words it returns nothing.

SELECT * FROM table WHERE title REGEXP
‘w[ao]rd sec[or]nd th[io]rd’

I don’t want to search for word OR second OR third i want to have them all in the title,just like in the upper case with LIKE.

I was thinking maybe to explode the search string the user inputs then in a foreach do a regexp word by word,but don’t know how to concatenate all of the variations into one query.

EDIT:
I forgot to mention that im searching in a utf8_unicode_ci collated table.
So really im trying to do a [cčć]orak type of search.

Answer 1

   SELECT * FROM table WHERE title REGEXP 'w[ao]rd|sec[or]nd|th[io]rd'

edit:

“okay so you want them to all be in the title and in that order?”

   SELECT * FROM table WHERE title REGEXP 'w[ao]rd.*sec[or]nd.*th[io]rd'

This will look for those words (and the variations) and make them be in that order, so for example

word blahblah second more blah third