Similar Text search

Question

im using the following code to search for similar text. But for some reason it only returns the same value no matter what i search. can someone see what the issue might be?

    $result = mysql_query("SELECT keyword FROM search");
$storeArray = Array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
$storeArray[] =  $row['keyword'];  
      }
foreach ($storeArray as $key){
    //echo "'".$key."'";
}  



$my_word = $_POST['value'];

$all_words = array(
"'".$key."'"
);

$bestMatch = array('word' => $my_word, 'match' => 2);

foreach($all_words as $word) {
similar_text($word, $my_word, $percent);
if($percent > $bestMatch['match']) $bestMatch = array('word' => $word, 'match' =>     $percent);
}

if($bestMatch['match'] < 100) echo 'Did you mean: <strong>' . $bestMatch['word'] .   '</strong>';

Answer 1

I edited it a little, tell me if this is what you want.

$my_word = $_POST['value'];
$bestMatch = array('word' => $my_word, 'match' => 2);
$result = mysql_query("SELECT keyword FROM search");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
            //run similar text on each row
        similar_text($row['keyword'], $my_word, $percent);
            //if row has a better score, overwrite $bestMatch
        if ($percent > $bestMatch['match'])
            $bestMatch = array('word' => $row['keyword'], 'match' => $percent);
}
if ($bestMatch['match'] < 100)
    echo 'Did you mean: <strong>' . $bestMatch['word'] .   '</strong>';

EDIT: don't forget that similar_text was shown to give good results only for words who already have a big similarity (in terms of length mainly), I think it's an 80% resemblance (combining both character counts and lengths). Not 100% sure though...

Answer 2

It appears you're doing this in your code, and can explain only getting one result.

$all_words = array(
    "'".$key."'"
);

foreach($all_words as $word) {
    // ...
}

what you're doing is running a foreach() on $key , which doesn't exist, and therefore getting the closest match to '' .. which will always be the same thing.

Try changing that foreach() to foreach($storeArray as $word) , or something similar.

here are some debug tactics - put this code above if($bestMatch['match'] < 100) .

echo '<pre>';
echo $my_word;
print_r($storeArray);
print_r($all_words);
echo '/<pre>';

what you're looking for is that $all_words contains all of the words you want to be running similar_text() on.