Search Engine Help

[menwn]

Hi everyone,

I am building a search engine and I have come across a rather difficult situation. I want to have the ability to search with wildcards but the results have to be as a phrase.

For example If i search for app* mac* I want results containing the the PHRASE 'application mackintosh' or the PHRASE 'apple machines' and not 'application' and 'mackintosh' as words within the text.

Does anyone know the answer?
Thanks in advance for any help.
menwn

 

[jpadie]

have a look at regular expressions. in this case you want to interpret the * as any character EXCEPT FOR a space or punctuation character. regex can do this for you.

the php functions are ereg and preg based.

a good site for regex is

http://www.regular-expressions.info