MySQL在单词上选择（复数，单数）

Question

In my Mysql DB I have a list of terms like (With First letters Capital and most of the time plurals)

Hairdressers
Restaurants
Beauty Salons 
Fournitures For Restaurants

On my website I have a searchbar where the user can search for those word (my website is a kind of POI finder). But I'm having problems with my query.

SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE word = 'userword'

1: If the user enter restaurants, it doesn't work because he put 'r' on lower case. 2: if the user enter restaurant either because because he didn't put it in plural

I have tried with SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE word like 'userword'

This fix the problem for the Capital leters, but I have no idea how to make the query work when the user enter the word in singular. is the only solution add that word in DB as well ?

Thank you

Answer 1

Maybe it is better with a regular expression that match also plural name testing only for an additional s at the end of the word :

SELECT * FROM table where word REGEXP '^userword[s]?'

Note that regular expression match in MySQL are case insensitive by default.

Answer 2

When you use LIKE you can use % to signify wildcards

So:

SELECT * FROM table where word like '%userword%'

Matches:

userword, userwords, superuserwords, ...

But if you use LIKE thus (note the additional s ):

SELECT * FROM table where word like '%userwords%'

It does not match:

userword, superuserword, ...

Answer 3

The best solution is to use a proper search engine for this which will use an appropriate analyser and a stemmer in order to serve quality results back to the users. Such a search engine is lucene and if you don't want to deal with implementation details you can use Solr which is a search server.