[SOLVED] Special Characters and Searches with Laravel 3

Special Characters and Searches with Laravel 3

I am using a grid to display businesses. I'm going to strip down our laravel call to bare minimum so lets say I have about 20,000 businesses and I don't want to load them all if I don't need to. So I am showing a search bar before the grid is loaded to type and query and based on their search input, I load what matches using Laravel into the grid.

The issue I am having is with Special Characters. If in the DB I have a Business Name of Lucky's Bar, and the users search input is Luckys Bar w/o the apostrophe, it doesn't find the result. Same with slashes or dashes.

What is the best approach to accomplishing this?

PHP - Search Statement

public function search($search_input) {
   $response = DB::table(self::$table)
          ->select(array(
            'ID',
            'Signup_Date',
            'Business_Name'
        ))
        ->where('Business_Name', 'LIKE', '%'.$search_input.'%')
        ->order_by('Signup_Date', 'desc')
        ->get();
   return $response;
}

Using Laravel 3, yes I know it is outdated, we have plans to upgrade, but this is a current issue that needs fixing. https://laravel3.veliovgroup.com/docs/database/fluent

Solution

One way, which might be unacceptably slow, is

WHERE REPLACE(field, "'", "") LIKE 'tam osha%"

where in the DB it is stored as Tam O'Shanter.