Say you have a list of movie titles, and you want to either sort them, or search through them, and some of them have “The ” at the start, for example:
- The Simpsons
- Simpson Street
When doing a MySQL search:
SELECT * FROM movies WHERE title LIKE "The Simp%";
Would only return the first row. But if you are working in a company where there is no standard set, the movie title could be formatted as “Simpsons, The” – and then, it won’t be found.
To solve this, you could replace the “The ” letters with blank, and then sort out the field contents during the query:
$str_query = preg_replace("/(title like "(the )(.*)%")/i",
"REPLACE(LOWER(title), "the ", "") LIKE ("$3%")",
$str_query);
This will change :
"(title LIKE "The Simpsons")"
to,
"(title LIKE "Simpsons")"
But, the (the) in line 2 tells PHP to only replace it if starts with “The ” (case insenstive).
However, what if you want to search for “the” (not sure why you would…)
You need to do a negative lookahead, to tell the expression to only carry on, if the search phrase is not exactly “the”
if (preg_match("/(title like "(?!the)(.*)%")/i", $str_query)) {
The (?!the) is the readahead.
(.*) matches any string but it is greedy and you have to be carfeul that it doesn’t just accept everything to the end of $str_query. (but its okay in our case, as we are looking for % (the LIKE wildcard))
After all this, we can run:
SELECT * FROM movies WHERE $str_query;
But what about sorting? All the titles beginning with “The” will appear in the T section. Whereas really, we want the Simpsons to appear in the S section.
Add an easy ORDER BY clause here:
SELECT * FROM movies WHERE $str_query ORDER BY (REPLACE(title, "the ", "") ASC;
Sorted!
I want to start blogging too, what do you think, which blog cms is good for noob?
There are many. It depends on what level you want. Do you want a free account? Have you got your own web server? Are you confortable with installing apps on a server?
You stated a CMS, this is more than a blog, this is more of a collabatory website.
If you just want a free blog, on a free server, wordpress is very popular, then there is google blogger (http://www.blogger.com) – alternatively, search for free blogs on google!
Also, check to see what sort of domain name you’d get. Would http://www.domain.com/yourname be acceptable to you? if not, you might have to find a paid solution.
HTH, Chris.
Oh God, even just finding a simple movie title would give you problems.I’ve tried it out and I couldn’t find it.So frustrating.as is so confusing.how about if looking for a movie that really starts with only “the”? Is it possible to find the right partner of it? will it give us a list of the movie title that starts with “the” only and you don’t know the other remaining words?
correct key word can be possible just try!!!
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