I want to enable a user-friendly search for authors in a books database. When an author's name is spelled in several ways (T.S. Eliot; Eliot, T S; Eliot, Thomas Stearns, etc.) the user input using these different spellings should find all entries from this author. I thought I could get this done by isolating last name and initials and building the query (somewhat simplified) as "...where author like '%$lastname%' and author REGEXP '[[:<:]]$Initial[0][-/A-Za-z\(\)\. ]*[[:<:]]$Initial[1]'"
This, however, also finds authors like 'Thompson, Eliot and Simpson, Ken'. To narrow down the search I am now trying to find a way to instruct Mysql to find both initials in the required order in two consecutive words only, so only in 'T.S.' or 'Thomas Stearns' or minor variants. I cannot discover in the Mysql manual, nor in Dubois, nor in Friedl's regex book, how to do this. [[:<:]] doesn's have a negation, which would come in handy here. Are there any regex wizards who could help? Are there other ways to accomplish what I want? Thanks in advance, Piet Wesselman --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
