Hello,

 

I wonder if someone could help me out here: I have a string holding a value "abcdefghijk stuvwxyz". If I search with regex

 

"(.*abc.*)+(.*uvw.*)+";

 

I get a match, no problem. But if I search for

 

"(.*uvw.*)+(.*abc.*)+"; 

 

I get no match. is there a way where you could ignore the order of the words in some way? I would like to be able to search within a text for one or several words or part of words, but all words that are entered in the search-field MUST appear in the text to be searched through - no matter what order.

 

thanks!

 

Christoph 

 

 

You may achieve what you want using lookahead (provided your regex dialect understands it):

^(?=.*abc)(?=.*xyz) 

will match if both words are found. You won't have capturing groups with the found words though.

Hello there,

 

I tried this out, but get a warning in PHP, saying that this is an invalid call of my MySQL-query (saying that I use the RegExp-function in MySQL). Is there any other way to solve this?

 

Christoph 

Looks like MySQL does not support lookarounds then.

You could try to put all possible permutations into your pattern, but this gets ugly soon:

abc.*uvw|uvw.*abc

May I ask why you don't stick with SQL?

SELECT * FROM table t WHERE  t.column LIKE '%abc%' AND t.column LIKE '%uvw%';

doesn't even need a regular expression and might be quite a bit faster.

If you absolutely have to use a regex, try:

SELECT * FROM table t WHERE  t.column REGEXP 'abc' AND t.column REGEXP 'uvw';