Not for 'how-to' coding questions but PHP theory instead, this forum is here for those of us who wish to learn about design aspects of programming with PHP.
Hello, I have a site in which customers upload documents (Microsoft office docs).
I would like to incorporate a search feature that will allow me to search through the documents.
For instance, if I have a word document on my server that had text containing the phrase; "Sandy went to school at Gonzaga University". And my user typed "Gonzaga" into the search form a link to that document would appear.
I'm assuming this will take more then PHP but any help would be appreciated.
I'd advise using a database for that - if you use mySQL, use the fulltext feature there.
Getting the content of MS Word-document into the database, however, is an altogether different matter. You'd need a converter for that - there are commercial packages out there, but the names escape me...
No, what I meant was that you'd store the plain content of those files (searchable) in the database, while the original files remain in a directory on the server.
No, it's not a double entry. You only use the database to search. Searching through n word documents would take a very considerable amount of time, while most databases are optimised for searching.