Split text under few conditions (PHP)

Question

I have a form input field 'text' and I want to create different query depending on value put in that field by a user

if the there is just a phrase - search each word (f.e. 'Hello World'):
```
SELECT (...) WHERE x LIKE '%Hello%' AND x LIKE '%World%' etc...
```
if the phrase is in quotation marks - search whole phrase (f.e. '"Hello World"'):
```
SELECT (...) WHERE x LIKE '%Hello World%'
```

And that's cool - I can do that.

But my problem starts when I have to mix above functionality - so f.e. if the phrase is 'Hello World "my name is" John' - it should search like this:

SELECT (...) 
WHERE x LIKE '%Hello%' 
    AND x LIKE '%World%' 
    AND x LIKE '%my name is%' 
    AND x LIKE '%John%'

How would You implement such functionality and manage to do that in php?

It's unclear what your issue is. What are you unable to do, exactly? Separate the text inside the quotes? Build the query? — rjdown, Jul 25 '16 at 18:06

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

You could use a preg_match_all(...):

$text = 'Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing \\"elit" dolor';
preg_match_all('/"(?:\\\\.|[^\\\\"])*"|\S+/', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches);

which will produce:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Lorem
            [1] => ipsum
            [2] => "dolor sit amet"
            [3] => consectetur
            [4] => "adipiscing \"elit"
            [5] => dolor
        )

)

And as you can see, it also accounts for escaped quotes inside quoted strings.

A short explanation:

"           # match the character '"'
(?:         # start non-capture group 1 
  \\        #   match the character '\'
  .         #   match any character except line breaks
  |         #   OR
  [^\\"]    #   match any character except '\' and '"'
)*          # end non-capture group 1 and repeat it zero or more times
"           # match the character '"'
|           # OR
\S+         # match a non-whitespace character: [^\s] and repeat it one or more times

And in case of matching %22 instead of double quotes, you'd do:

preg_match_all('/%22(?:\\\\.|(?!%22).)*%22|\S+/', $text, $matches);

You can check this also

Poiz · Answer 2 · 2016-07-25T18:28:29.453

You can use preg_replace() and preg_split() within preg_replace_callback with a few declared variables to build up your Query. The Code Snippet below shows how:

<?php

    $str        = 'Hello World, "My Name is" and "her name is"';
    $matches    = array();
    $result     = preg_replace_callback("#\".*?\"#", function($match) use(&$matches, &$str) {
        $matches[]  = trim($match[0], ",.:?;\"");
        $res        = preg_split("#\s.*?#", preg_replace("#\".*?\"#", "", $str));
        $matches    = array_merge($matches, $res);
        $matches    = array_unique(array_filter(array_merge($matches, $res)));
    }, $str);

    $query      = "SELECT * FROM `tbl_name` AS tbl WHERE ";
    foreach($matches as $searchTerm){
        $query .= " tbl.x LIKE '%" . $searchTerm . "%' OR ";
    }
    $query      = rtrim($query, " OR ");


    var_dump($query);
    var_dump($matches);

The 2 var_dumps() above: var_dump($query) and var_dump($matches) respectively produces:

    string 'SELECT * FROM `tbl_name` AS tbl WHERE  tbl.x LIKE '%My Name is%' OR  tbl.x LIKE '%Hello%' OR  tbl.x LIKE '%World,%' OR  tbl.x LIKE '%and%' OR  tbl.x LIKE '%her name is%'' (length=169)

    array (size=5)
      0 => string 'My Name is' (length=10)
      1 => string 'Hello' (length=5)
      2 => string 'World,' (length=6)
      3 => string 'and' (length=3)
      4 => string 'her name is' (length=11)

Split text under few conditions (PHP)

2 Answers2