具有中间首字母的 meta_query 搜索名称 - PHP、WordPress

Question

I have to build a search form where I search members of the company by their Full Name (First Name + Middle Initial + Last Name). All the names are in this form: John B. Doe .

The below code is working on these cases: John, John B., Doe, B., John B. Doe , but not working the query search is: John Doe .

 if (isset($_POST['search']) && $_POST['search'] != -1) {
    $args['meta_query']['name_search']['key'] = "_full_name";
    $args['meta_query']['name_search']['compare'] = "LIKE";
    $args['meta_query']['name_search']['value'] = $_POST['search'];
  }

How should I improve the query in order to work with both: the name and surname (John Doe) and the name, surname plus the middle initial (John B. Doe)?

Answer 1

First off, if only WordPress doesn't escape the % characters in the value (ie the search keyword), you could've simply replaced spaces in the search keyword with % , hence you'd get a clause like meta_value LIKE '%John%Doe%' which would match John B. Doe .

So because the % in the search keyword is being escaped (which is a good thing, BTW), then you can instead use REGEXP (regular expression search) and then replace the spaces with a .* which is equivalent to the % in a LIKE clause.

Working Example

Replace this in your code:

$args['meta_query']['name_search']['compare'] = "LIKE";
$args['meta_query']['name_search']['value'] = $_POST['search'];

with this:

// Build the regular expression pattern.
$list = preg_split( '/ +/', trim( $_POST['search'] ) );
$regex = implode( '.*', array_map( 'preg_quote', $list ) );

// Then set 'compare' to REGEXP and 'value' to the above pattern.
$args['meta_query']['name_search']['compare'] = 'REGEXP';
$args['meta_query']['name_search']['value'] = $regex;

Tried & tested working in WordPress 5.7.2, but do take note of the "not multibyte safe" warning in the MySQL reference manual .

Alternate Solution (equivalent to the one above)

If you want to use LIKE and not REGEXP , but don't want to end up with potentially lots of meta queries for the same key, then you can:

Use three search fields, namely first name, last name, and middle initial, and three meta clauses, one for each search field, but all having key set to _full_name . Eg

/*
 * Assuming your form contains these:
    <input name="first_name">
    <input name="last_name">
    <input name="middle_initial">
 */

$name_search = array(
    'relation' => 'AND',
);

// * okay, this still uses 3 clauses, but it always would be just 3 clauses
foreach ( array( 'first_name', 'last_name', 'middle_initial' ) as $name ) {
    if ( ! empty( $_POST[ $name ] ) ) {
        $name_search[ $name ] = array(
            'key'     => '_full_name',
            'value'   => sanitize_text_field( $_POST[ $name ] ),
            'compare' => 'LIKE',
        );
    }
}

$args['meta_query']['name_search'] = $name_search;

Answer 2

I can suggest the following solution:

$search = $_POST['search'];
$words  = explode( $search, ' ' );
$words  = array_filter(
    $words,
    function ( $word ) {
        return ! empty( trim( $word ) );
    }
);

foreach ( $words as $index => $word ) {
    $query_name          = "name_search_$index";
    $args['meta_query'][ $query_name ] = [
        'key'     => '_full_name',
        'value'   => $word,
        'compare' => 'LIKE',
    ];
}

Code explanation:

1. I split search phrases into words. Words are any sequence of symbols between spaces
2. I remove spaces. If your search string is

   John Doe

   or

   John Doe

   or

   John Doe

   The search result should be the same.
3. I build multiple queries. Every query corresponds to a single word. If you search John Doe the query builds by 2 queries. Queries count as much as the number of words.

The problems with this solution:

1. Too many words are too many queries. Too many LIKE-containing queries are too slow.
2. You will get the same result for searching for

   John Doe

   and

   Doe John

   . The order of the words makes no difference to the result.

---

I recommend using this solution only as a temporary solution. Good solution - is using Full-Text Search plugins or write Full-Text Search solution yourself. More details about FullText search you could find on MySQL official page: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/fulltext-search.html