WHERE clause headache in SELECT!

[yduk]

Hey,

Ok I want to be able to select items from my news table that only relates to the category specified but it needs to search all of the fields that have FULLTEXT as well.

I have the following:

 $news = "SELECT * FROM NEWS WHERE category = $cat AND title LIKE '%" . $VARDescription . "%' OR shorttext LIKE '%" . $VARDescription . "%' OR text LIKE '%" . $VARDescription . "%' LIMIT $limitvalue, $limit";

Problem is, it selects everything from the table if for example, title=test, it will find all entries with test, even if the category is not the one I specified in my search.

I only want it to select the data that relates to the category I have selected in my search, but at the same time it needs to check all of the fields to make sure it only gets the relevant data. Any ideas?

Does that make sense?

Cheers,
Chris

[eXplosive]

Reevaluate your SQL query. You are doing some pretty loose checking; which is most likely causing all the entries to be returned.

[r937]

classic problem of evaluating ANDs and ORs

ANDs take precedence

you have WHERE x AND a OR b OR c

this is being evaluated as WHERE ( x AND a ) OR b OR c

what you want is WHERE x AND ( a OR b OR c)

you must code the parentheses to force that sequence of evaluation