mysql SELECT LIKE must match whole words only to the variable

Question

I have a $string variable, and I use SELECT * FROM db WHERE description LIKE '%$string%' OR headline LIKE '%$string%'

As seen, i want to search the two fields "description" and "headline" to see if the string variable matches any of them...

Problem is that I want it to match whole words!!!

Ex: If description contains "hello", it is enough if $string is an 'h'... this is not what I want... it has to match the whole word only!

Must i split the querystring into words for this? or what?

Please help... thanks alot!

Answer 1

If you want full word matching you should consider trying FULLTEXT searching. One prerequisite is that your table must be using the MyISAM engine:

CREATE TABLE test (
  id INT(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  headline VARCHAR(120) NOT NULL,
  description VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
  FULLTEXT(headline, description)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

You would query for matches like so:

SELECT *
FROM test
WHERE MATCH (headline,description) AGAINST('$string');

This has the added benefit of ordering your results by relevancy.

Answer 2

An alternative to full text searching, which may be sufficient, is to use a REGEXP function.

Your example query might then be:

SELECT *
  FROM db
 WHERE description REGEXP '[[:<:]]$string[[:>:]]' = 1
    OR headline REGEXP '[[:<:]]$string[[:>:]]' = 1

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/regexp.html

Answer 3

what if put space before and after $string in % %

then we use like :

SELECT * FROM db WHERE description like '% $string %' OR headline like '% $string %'

i haven't test this just post reply

Vasim Padhiyar