Search for a string or part of string in PHP

Question

I am doing a very small online store application in PHP. So I have an array of maps in PHP. I want to search for a string (a product) in the array. I looked at array_search

Answer 1

Unfortunately, search is one of the more difficult things to do in computer science. If you build for search based on literal string matches or regular expressions (regex), you may find that you'll be unhappy with the relevance of the results that are returned.

If you're interested in rolling up your sleeves and getting a little dirty with a more sophisticated solution, I'd try Zend's Lucene implementation ( http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.lucene.html ). I've implemented a search on a site with it. It took a few days, but the results were MUCH better than the 15 minute solution of literal string matching.

Let me know if you'd like more info.

Best of luck!

PS. Here's an example: http://devzone.zend.com/article/91