how do i search an address form a group of columns from a table (zip,state,country)?

Question

scenarioi:- 1) User enters an address into a search field. Address maybe zip,state or country

2) Now i have to take that address which may be in any order or which may just contain the country, state or zip and check the database if the the results exists or not.

Any advice on this topic would be awesome

Answer 1

How about this one?

'SELECT * FROM table WHERE address LIKE \''. addslashes($search) .'\'
  OR zip = '. (int)$search .'
  OR country LIKE \''. addslashes($search) .'\''

Answer 2

I would do something like :

split address on space

build where clause as

WHERE zip||state||country like '%address_part_one%'
   OR zip||state||country like '%address_part_two%'
and so on ...

If you have fulltext enabled for the three fields :

WHERE MATCH (zip,state,country) AGAINST ('address_part_one')
   OR MATCH (zip,state,country) AGAINST ('address_part_two')
...