PHP question

[mcdougrs]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping that there are a couple of PHP people on here that might be able to help me out. I keep running into some code that I don't see that much but I have no idea what it does. The context for this code is in an SQL statement and the info is passed in from a simple html form.

if ($mode == "name") { 
                $query_middle = " WHERE lname LIKE '%$criteria%' ";

What do those % signs do? Like I said before I've seen this a couple of time before but never knew what it did.

The only thing that I can think of is that its a shortcut way of getting at data that was passed to the file via a previous html form. Is that what that is?

[redhead]

The keyword here is the LIKE operator, it will return what ever resembles given parameter.

'%something%' means any text containing anything befor this something and anything after this something
If you were to use 'something%' then the text would have to start with something there are other delimiters you can use, such as '*' and '?' but I can't remember what they do, I thin k'?'is for single charactor.

[mcdougrs]

OH OK so its a SQL thing.... That makes sense. I forgot all about that. Thanx for clearing that up.