Re: How do I build a search engine for a MySQL database?

[Oriol Portell - UV]

Thanks, Kris.

I probably expressed myself very bad... Actually I have done almost all the work. That means that I know how to connect to a database and how to "manually" build SQL statements in order to do a search. But I have a big problem: I don't know how to analize complex text queries and converting them to SQL select statements. For example: entering "preposition (place OR time)" in a text field and getting the corresponding select statement.

I cannot analize myself the text query from an HTML form because I don't know how to do it through regexps. So, the first option is to enter only simple queries and then I add the % wildcard myself to the select statement, but it is not very useful.

The perl modules I found in CPAN (Text-Query and Text-Query-SQL) convert complex text queries in Altavista syntax to SQL statements, but they don't put the % wildcard to the query words. These modules allow me to do more or less successful queries, but if I enter the text quoted above -- preposition (place OR time) -- the result does not include all the database entries with "prepositions" (the plural) and it is a bit annoying...

Thanks,

- Oriol -