Find & Insert Part of urlQuery value?

[Rika]

hello all,

Im trying to dynamically insert text onto a page by inserting a value from a query string using php. This was simple enough when i wanted to insert the entire value, but im having trouble finding information on how to search the value for a word (from a list of words) and if it contains one to echo/print just that word, not the entire value.

So far i have the basic 'return the whole value' scripts.

<?php if($_GET['KEY'] == "")
{
    // no keyword entered
    echo "";
}
else
{
    echo $_GET['KEY']." Or Any City";
}
?>
</span>

The value of the key contains a location eg. washington, the value could just be one word(and the above code works if it is), but its more likely to contain more words eg. ?key=washington something somethingelse

I need to find a way of searching this value against a list of locations (eg. washington, new york, la, etc.. If the value of the key contains one of the locations in the list, then i need to insert just that location into the page, not the entire value.

Im not sure how this is best done, if anyone has any ideas or knows where i can find help, it'd be much appreciated.

Thanks, Rika

[iamthwee]

Put the key locations in an array and loop through the array?

[iamthwee]

Maybe something?

<?php

$word_to_match = "New York";

$locations = array("Washington","New York","Brooklyn");

foreach ($locations as $c)
{
  if ( $c == $word_to_match)
  {
    echo "Word found : $c <br>";
  }
  else
    echo "Nope <br>";
}
?>

You might also want to look at the function array_push which is presumably more flexible.

Btw, the above is untested and straight from my head, it may or may not work :)

[Eko]

If the user input is ,for example "house Seattle job" and you wanna get the Seattle word, you can do this with explode http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

php if($_GET['KEY'] == "")
{
    // no keyword entered
    echo "";
}
else
{
    $userCity=array();
    $userCity=explode(" ",$_GET['key']);

Now you must loop through the userCity array and compare with another array or with what you used to store the city names
Here you must have a convetion.All the citynames must be in lower/uppercase in order to get a good comparison . So you must do an additional operation before using the for : $userInputCity=strtolower($_GET) assuming that the names in cities array are also lowercase

foreach($userCity as $key1 => $inputcity)
{  
      foreach($cities as $key2 => $cityname)
      {
           if($inputcity == $cityname)
             echo 'found a city';
        }
}

If the input city name is composed of a single word , this would work fine , but if is something like New York , Los Angeles than in the for loop you must add :

elseif($key1 != 0 )
 {
   $twoWordCity=$userCity[$key1-1]." ".$userCity[$key1];
   if( $twoWordCity == $cityname )
        echo 'found a city';
}

Later edit :

After a second thought , it's much easier to just use the strpos() , like this :

$myCityNamesArray=('london','new york','sydney',......);

$cityInput=strtolower($_GET['key']);

foreach($myCityNamesArray as $cityName )
{
    if( strpos( $cityInput , $cityName ) !== false )
    {
        echo 'found it ';
        break;
     }
}