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Creating A Simple Search Engine in PHP

This document provides instructions for creating a simple search engine using PHP and MySQL. It explains how to build a basic front-end webpage with a search form, connect to a MySQL database, validate the user's search query, query the database to find matches, and output the results. The search engine allows users to search a database table by first, middle, or last name and returns matching names from the table along with the number of matches found.

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yasudhar
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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344 views

Creating A Simple Search Engine in PHP

This document provides instructions for creating a simple search engine using PHP and MySQL. It explains how to build a basic front-end webpage with a search form, connect to a MySQL database, validate the user's search query, query the database to find matches, and output the results. The search engine allows users to search a database table by first, middle, or last name and returns matching names from the table along with the number of matches found.

Uploaded by

yasudhar
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

Creating A Simple Search Engine In PHP (ver. 1.0.

0)
by: SpiderMan of Black Sun Research Facility

Introduction:

This is the first in what I hope will be a long list of tutorials that I like to call Practical
Programming in PHP. Lets get down to business, today I'm going to show you how to
create a simple search engine that you can use for your very own site or some other
project that you may be working on. For this tutorial I will be using a MySQL database.
The bulk of the code should be compatible with PHP 3 and 4.

Background:

Before we begin, I'll show you the table I'll be using in the examples:

First_Name Middle_Name Last_Name


Dana Johnson Smith
Jill Angel Petersburg
Jack Coner Mitchel

If you feel confused about any of the functions in the tutorial, have a look at my
previous tutorial that deals with common database functions.

Down To Work:

Before we actually make the search engine, we need to create a basic webpage that
will have an input field where the user can enter his or her search query. I'm going to
keep mine simple; feel free to make an elaborate one with lots of bells and whistles. The
code for my page is below:

<html>
<head>
<title>Simple Search Engine version 1.0</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
Enter the first, last, or middle name of the person you are looking for:
<form action="search.php" method="post">
<input type="text" name="search_query" maxlength="25" size="15"><br>
<input type="reset" name="reset" value="Reset">
<input type="text" name="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
</center>
</body>
</html>

It's a pretty basic page so I'm not going to explain alot of it. Basically, the user will enter
the first, middle, or last name of the person they are looking for and hit enter. The
contents of the input field will be passed to a php script named “search.php” which will
handle the rest.

Now that the page is out of the way, let's create the actual script. First, we need to
connect to the database using mysql_pconnect() and select the table using
mysql_select_db(). Next, we want to parse the value passed to the script to see if it
contains any invalid input, such as numbers and funky characters like #&*^. You should
always validate input, don't rely on things like JavaScript to do it for you, because once
the user disables JavaScript all that fancy validation goes down the toilet. To check the
input we are going to use a regular expression, they are a bit confusing and will be
explained in a later tutorial. For now, all you need to know is that it will check to see if
value passed is a string of characters. All right, enough chatter, here is the first part of
the script:

<?php
mysql_pconnect("host", "username", "password") or die("Can't connect!");
mysql_select_db("Names") or die("Can't select database!");

if (!eregi("[[:alpha:]]", $search_query))
{
echo "Error: you have entered an invalid query, you can only use characters!<br>";
exit;
}

Now that we've done that, we will form the search query.

$query= mysql_query("SELECT * FROM some_table WHERE First_Name= '$search_query'


OR Middle_Name= '$search_query' OR Last_Name= '$search_query' ORDER BY Last_Name");

Look confusing? I'll explain, what's happening is, we're asking MySQL to search all the
rows in First_Name, Middle_Name, and Last_Name for a match to the query entered by
the user; then, take the results of that search, alphabetize the results by Last_Name.

The rest of the coding from now on is a breeze. We will get the results from the query
using mysql_fetch_array( ), and check to see if there is a match using
mysql_num_rows(). If there is a match, or matches, we will output it along with the
number of matches found; if there isn't, we'll report to the user that we couldn't find
anything.

$result= mysql_num_rows($query);

if ($result == 0)
{
echo "Sorry, I couldn't find any user that matches your query ($search_query)";
exit;
}
else if ($result == 1)
{
echo "I've found <b>1</b> match!<br>";
}
else {
echo "I've found <b>$result</b> matches! <br>";
}

while ($row= mysql_fetch_array($query))


{
$first_name= $row["First_Name"];
$middle_name = $row["Middle_Name"];
$last_name = $row["Last_Name"];

echo "The first name of the user is: $first_name.<br>";


echo "The middle name of the user is: $middle_name.<br>";
echo "The last name of the user is: $last_name.<br>";
}
?>

I added that extra if statement so that when we report how many users we've found, its
output will be in proper English. If I we don't, the script will echo "I've found 1 matches"
which obviously isn't good grammar :P The rest of the script loops through the results
and prints them to a webpage. That's all, we've finished the script! The entire script is
included below:

<html>
<head>
<title>Simple Search Engine version 1.0 - Results </title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
mysql_pconnect("host", "username", "password") or die("Can't connect!");
mysql_select_db("Names") or die("Can't select database!");

if (!eregi("[[:alpha:]]", $search_query))
{
echo "Error: you have entered an invalid query, you can only use characters!<br>";
exit; //No need to execute the rest of the script.
}

$query= mysql_query("SELECT * FROM some_table WHERE First_Name='$search_query'


OR Middle_Name= '$search_query' OR Last_Name='$search_query' ORDER BY Last_Name");

$result= mysql_numrows($query);
if ($result == 0)
{
echo "Sorry, I couldn't find any user that matches your query ($search_query)";
exit; //No results found, why bother executing the rest of the script?
}
else if ($result == 1)
{
echo "I've found <b>1</b> match!<br>";
}
else {
echo "I've found <b>$result</b> matches!<br>";
}

while ($row= mysql_fetch_array($query))


{
$first_name= $row["First_Name"];
$middle_name = $row["Middle_Name"];
$last_name = $row["Last_Name"];

echo "The first name of the user is: $first_name.<br>";


echo "The middle name of the user is: $middle_name.<br>";
echo "The last name of the user is: $last_name. <br>";
}
?>
</body>
</html>

Conclusion:

Well that wraps up part 1 of the Practical Programming series. The pages I create were
extremely simple because the focus was on the script. You should jazz up your pages
with images and other cool effects. If you found any errors, or have any comments,
please e-mail me ([email protected]), kindly direct questions to the message board.

Last updated: 2/23/01

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