Creating a search function to search 1000+ text files?

PHP
1

I have custom coded a content management system which basically organizes articles into categories. Each article is represented by a text file which is analogous to a database record. I normally use PHP/MySQL but I opted to use text files here for my own reasons. Each text file has the same format, and stores the title, author, date, article text, and a few other fields. So anyhow, I would like to add search functionality to the site. Here are my thoughts so far:

  1. First I would have some function/routine that would take all the text files, and create some kind of super large index file.

  2. Then there would be a routine that could search this index file and return the best matching articles.

3) Alternately I could create a routine to export all of the articles to MySQL, and the website would use MySQL solely for the purpose of the search function.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks!

2

You may want to take a look at MySQL’s FULLTEXT search functionalities :slight_smile:

Note that these only work on MyISAM tables, not on InnoDB.

PS. Now that this has become a MySQL question, do you want me to move this thread to the MySQL forum?

3

Check out the MySQL manual for Full Text functions and examples, there’s plenty there. :wink:

4

Silly me…can we just delete this thread and I’ll create a new one in the mysql forum?

And thanks for the link guys, I’m checking it out now.

5

Ok, that’s what I assumed would be best…so let’s say I create a table with the following fields:

id
url
title
text

And I would have one record for each article. I’m not totally sure where to go from here, I’ve never implemented a search feature before :o

6

Yep, 3. The others are silly.

/runs :stuck_out_tongue: