FullTextSearching with PHP/MySQL

[wwwfilmfilercom]

I have what seems to be a growing problem implementing the search for my site. I was first using the basic LIKE query with MySQL and PHP but I found FullTextSearch to be more efficient in returning results.

The problem now is that FullTextSearch has a minimum word length of 4 words - I need to set this to 3. To do this I have checked the following link http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...ne-tuning.html but as you will see it needs my host to set up an option file.

My hosts have told me they cannot update/change the option file since I am on shared server. This means I am stuck.

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue - I have asked this same question in the database forum but without success. I am interested in learning how other PHP/MySQL developers perform searches. I thought FullTextSearch was brilliant, but if I cannot even search for words of 3 character lengths then thats no good. There must be other ways...

Can anyone offer any help/advice whatsoever...

[dclamp]

why not just go back to using LIKE query. i dont think you will have much luck if the preset is 4.

[penagate]

There are other full text search engines for MySQL, e.g. Sphinx.
If you're on shared hosting though you are out of luck. Sorry.

[wwwfilmfilercom]

It looks as though I will have to return to the LIKE query...

The reason I am using FullTextSearch in the first place is because I have a 'tags' field which has text such as 'fast red car'. If I search for 'car' then this will return that item. However if I search for 'slow car' then this item will not be returned.

In other words I want each separate word in my query to be searched against the 'tags' (and other) field[s] to find a match... does that make sense...? FullTextSearch worked very well..

[dclamp]

in that case you need a loop.

[wwwfilmfilercom]

Thanks for that - I think someone has mentioned the split function. However I'm still a little fuzzy on how to use it properly:

if $keyword = 'small red car';

and

$query = SELECT * FROM item WHERE item.name = $keyword AND item.tags = $keyword...

How do I change it to include the loop??

I'm guessing I split the keyword by spaces - so you get $k[0] = 'small' and so on...

But then how do I correctly search through each of these and return matches..? Do I do a search for each word in $k? I would want to return every single item which matches all of the keywords...

The great thing about FullTextSearch is the ability to sort by relevance or score. Is there a way to mimic this with LIKE query etc?

Thanks for the help;