laravel search multiple words separated by space

This is how you do it with Query\Builder, but first some additional notes:

// user can provide double space by accident, or on purpose:$string = 'john  doe';// so with explode you get this:explode(' ', $string);array(  0 => 'john',  1 => '',  2 => 'doe')// Now if you go with LIKE '%'.value.'%', you get this:select * from table where name like '%john%' or name like '%%' or ...

That said, you obviously can't rely on explode because in the above case you would get all the rows.

So, this is what you should do:

$string = 'john  doe';// split on 1+ whitespace & ignore empty (eg. trailing space)$searchValues = preg_split('/\s+/', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY); $users = User::where(function ($q) use ($searchValues) {  foreach ($searchValues as $value) {    $q->orWhere('name', 'like', "%{$value}%");  }})->get();

There is closure in the where because it is a good practice to wrap your or where clauses in parentheses. For example if your User model used SoftDeletingScope and you would not do what I suggested, your whole query would be messed up.

 $keywordRaw = "jhon doe";    $key = explode(' ',$keywordRaw)    $users = User::select('users.*')    ->whereIn('first_name',$key);

This would work.the whereIn would search for first name from the keywords you entered.

Have you considered using a FULLTEXT index on your first_name column?

You can create this index using a Laravel migration, although you need to use an SQL statement:

DB::statement('ALTER TABLE users ADD FULLTEXT(first_name);');

You can then run quite advanced searches against this field, like this:

$keywordRaw = "john doe";$keywords   = explode(' ', $keywordRaw);$users   = User::select("*")              ->whereRaw("MATCH (first_name)                          against (? in boolean mode)",[$keywords])              ->get();

That will match records containing either the words "john" or "doe"; note that this approach will match on whole words, rather than substrings (which can be the case if you use LIKE).

If you want to find records containing all words, you should precede each keyword with a '+', like this:

$keywords   = '+'.explode(' +', $keywordRaw);

You can even sort by relevance, although this is probably overkill for your needs (and irrelevant for "all" searches). Something like this:

$users = User::select("*")               ->selectRaw("MATCH (first_name)                            against (? in boolean mode)                            AS relevance",[$keywords])               ->whereRaw("MATCH (first_name)                           against (? in boolean mode)",[$keywords])               ->orderBy('relevance','DESC')               ->get();

There is a good article that covers this general approach here:

http://www.hackingwithphp.com/9/3/18/advanced-text-searching-using-full-text-indexes