Php – What’s the best way to implement typo correction into a search in php/thesql

full-text-searchMySQLPHPsearch

I have a site that lists movies. Naturally people make spelling mistakes when searching for movies, and of course there is the fact that some movies have apostrophes, use letters to spell out numbers in the title, etc.

How do I get my search script to overlook these errors? Probably need something that's a little more intelligent than WHERE mov_title LIKE '%keyword%'.

It was suggested that I use a fulltext search engine, but all of those things look really complicated, and I feel that building them into my application will be like hell on earth. If I do have to use one, what's the least invasive one, that will be most painless to implement into existing code?

Best Answer

I think you'll have to implement an external fulltext search engine. MySQL just isn't good at fulltext search. I'd say you should give Lucene a go (tutorials). Zend Framework has an API that plugs into Lucene, making it easier to learn and utilize.

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Php – Whats a fast alternative to plain fulltext searching in php

Give a look to Zend_Search_Lucene it's a PHP5 port of the Apache Lucene project, the query language is very powerful.

MySQL: @variable vs. variable. What’s the difference

MySQL has a concept of user-defined variables.

They are loosely typed variables that may be initialized somewhere in a session and keep their value until the session ends.

They are prepended with an @ sign, like this: @var

You can initialize this variable with a SET statement or inside a query:

SET @var = 1

SELECT @var2 := 2

When you develop a stored procedure in MySQL, you can pass the input parameters and declare the local variables:

DELIMITER //

CREATE PROCEDURE prc_test (var INT)
BEGIN
    DECLARE  var2 INT;
    SET var2 = 1;
    SELECT  var2;
END;
//

DELIMITER ;

These variables are not prepended with any prefixes.

The difference between a procedure variable and a session-specific user-defined variable is that a procedure variable is reinitialized to NULL each time the procedure is called, while the session-specific variable is not:

CREATE PROCEDURE prc_test ()
BEGIN
    DECLARE var2 INT DEFAULT 1;
    SET var2 = var2 + 1;
    SET @var2 = @var2 + 1;
    SELECT  var2, @var2;
END;

SET @var2 = 1;

CALL prc_test();

var2  @var2
---   ---
2     2


CALL prc_test();

var2  @var2
---   ---
2     3


CALL prc_test();

var2  @var2
---   ---
2     4

As you can see, var2 (procedure variable) is reinitialized each time the procedure is called, while @var2 (session-specific variable) is not.

(In addition to user-defined variables, MySQL also has some predefined "system variables", which may be "global variables" such as @@global.port or "session variables" such as @@session.sql_mode; these "session variables" are unrelated to session-specific user-defined variables.)

Best Answer

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