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I'm trying to get my full text search (in boolean mode) to retrieve words with three letters or less.

Currently, if I search for something like "NBA", I don't get any results.

However, if I append the wild card operator "*" to the search term, I get results.

I also read that you could remove the three word limit in my.ini, but I'm wondering if there was a better way to do this on the fly.

Svante
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Digital Craft Studios
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1 Answers1

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This section of the manual might interest you : 11.8.6. Fine-Tuning MySQL Full-Text Search (quoting a portion of it) :

The minimum and maximum lengths of words to be indexed are defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables. The default minimum value is four characters; the default maximum is version dependent. If you change either value, you must rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes.
For example, if you want three-character words to be searchable, you can set the ft_min_word_len variable by putting the following lines in an option file:

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3

Then you must restart the server and rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes.

(You should read that page, for more informations I didn't copy-paste ;-) )

Pascal MARTIN
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  • Thanks Pascal, I read the same already, the idea I have is to do it with a PHP function that checks the length of the search phrase and appends the wildcard * modifier if it is less than ft_min_word_len wondering if there is a better way to go about it than that... – Digital Craft Studios Oct 18 '09 at 18:30
  • Oh, sorry, didn't understand that ;; I don't have much of an idea about that... not sure it would be good performance wise, though ;; just as a sidenote : what about using some external indexing/searching engine, like solr or sphinx ? – Pascal MARTIN Oct 18 '09 at 18:32
  • thanks, I've heard of sphinx but haven't had the time to wrap my head around it yet, will look into it soon – Digital Craft Studios Oct 18 '09 at 19:13