I was thinking to assign points (percentage) to matching fields (last name, first name, email, phone, city, zip, phone) and then list people with more than 50%. e.g., if first and last name match - 75%, if only email match - 85%, if first name, last name and email match - 100%, if last name and phone match - 50%... etc. does anybody have any experience with such a problem? or something
similar? Although you should be able to do this with you SELECT (I guess, never have), since you posted this to a PHP mailing, you get a PHP answer! Look up Levinshtein in the php manual and start from there: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.levenshtein.php If you can do this on SELECT (using the db engine), I would suggest that, as that way you don't have to return a giant list to poke through. You can also use wildcards, and only select matches that have the first three characters: $lastname = strpos('Rogers',0,2); $firstname = strpos('Timothy',0,2); $select = "SELECT `uid`,`LastName`,`FirstName` FROM `users` WHERE LastName='$lastname%' AND FirstName='$firstname%'"; I haven't tested that, but I think it would work. You would need to work on a way to LIMIT the matches effectively. If that doesn't work, hey, this is a PHP list... -- Jared Farrish Intermediate Web Developer Denton, Tx Abraham Maslow: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." $$
