Question

What I’m trying to do is get an input text from the user (for example lets say ‘Java programmer’) and trying to match this user input with a list of strings that I have stored in an array like ‘Java programmer is a good boy’, ‘he plays ball at times’, ‘java and dogs hate each other’, ‘ dogs are not java programmers’

I’m trying to do word matching so the program outputs a list of all strings in the array that match all words in user query (order isn’t important)

So I want the output of the below code to be…

‘Java programmer is a good boy’
‘dogs are not java programmers’

Because these terms contain both ‘java’ and ‘programmers’ as per the query the user enters

Here’s the code I wrote, it doesn’t work. Any help will be much appreciated.

<?php
$relatedsearches = array();
$querytowords = array();
$string = "Java programmer"; //GET INPUT FROM USER
$querywords = (explode(' ', $string));
foreach($querywords as $z)
    {
            $querytowords[] = $z;
            }

//ARRAY THAT STORES MASTER LIST OF QUERIES

$listofsearhches = array('Java programmer is a good boy', 'he plays ball at times', 'java and dogs hate each other', ' dogs are not java programmers');

foreach($listofsearhches as $c)
    {
    for ($i=0; $i<=(count($querytowords)-1); $i++)
        {   
        if(strpos(strtolower($c), strtolower($querytowords[$i])) === true)
            { 
            if($i=(count($querytowords)-1))
                {
                $relatedsearches[] = $c;
                } 
            } else { break; }
        }
    }

echo '<br>';
if(empty($relatedsearches))
    {
        echo 'Sorry No Matches found';
    } 
    else 
    {
    foreach($relatedsearches as $lister)
        {
                echo $lister;
                echo '<br>';
                }
            }

?>

Answer 1

I’d do something like this:-

$matches = array();
$string = 'java programmer';
$stringBits = explode(' ', $string);
$listOfSearches = array('Java programmer is a good boy', 'he plays ball at times', 'java and dogs hate each other', ' dogs are not java programmers');

foreach($listOfSearches as $l) {
  $match = true;
  foreach($stringBits as $b) {
    if(!stristr($l, $b)) {
      $match = false;
    }
  }
  if($match) {
    $matches[] = $l;
  }
}

if(!empty($matches)) {
  echo 'matches: ' . implode(', ', $matches);
} else {
  echo 'no matches found';
}

So loop over the list of strings to search, set a flag ($match), then for every word in the $string check it exists somewhere in the current $listOfSearches string, if a word doesn’t exist it will set the $match to false.

After checking for every word, if the $match is still true, add to the current string from $listOfSearches to the $matches array.