Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 05/27/05 04:47

glakk@potatoradio.f2s.com wrote:
> I want to build an application that would let people search records of
> content, based on keywords. The content record table would have a field
> called 'tags' which would be a comma-seperated string of keywords. It
> would be very simple to search for records where the user enters only
> one keyword, by searching for the keyword within the keyword string
> in the record.
>
> But I'd like to let the user enter more than one keyword, and be able
> to select records that have -any- keywords that match -any- of the
> keywords the user enters. And, have the results sorted by how many
> matching keywords are found.
>
> I know that MySQL has a "set" data type, but I have no idea whether
> it would apply to this problem, or how to use it.
>
> Can anyone help?
> TIA,
>

Look into normalizing databases.

A properly normalized database would never have multiple fields in a
column like this. Rather, create another table which two columns. The
first column is an id from the first table; the second column is ONE
keyword.

Now you can search the second table and get the appropriate keys for the
rows in the first table.


--
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Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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