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POSplit Letters Into Combination Chunks w/ Simplified Query
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copied!<p>It's a confusion problem - so the wording may seem hard to follow. I'm likely over complicating a simple problem. Added an example question to help figure this out.</p> <h2>Example Question</h2> <p>Finding a 5 letter word from a database with the characters hxinenvarbav. I've organized the words in the DB to also contain a column of the word in alphabetical format. This means, the word "happy" has a column with the value "ahppy", so from the letters hxinenvarbav I can alphabetically organize them using the following code. </p> <pre><code><? $letters = str_split('hxinenvarbav'); asort($letters); $letters = implode('',$letters); // returns 'aabehinnrvvx' ?> </code></pre> <h2>The Issue</h2> <p>However, I can't simply search with mysql "LIKE '%aabehinnrvvx%' " and find 5 letter words with those characters, as obviously that will not pull any results. Unless maybe there is a MySQL query I could do? Maybe organize the column differently. I can however, use str_split($letters,5) to take 5 letters chunks of the 12 letter combination.</p> <p>How would I go about, splitting in chunks each possible 5 letter combination from these 12 letters while keeping in mind, I need to query the table.</p> <p>Does this make sense? Do I need to elaborate any further? Likely, I'm just over thinking and can't seem to simplify what it is I'm trying to accomplish. I have some complex mathematics that can find all possible combinations. But since I have placed in alphabetical order, I'm only searching combinations - not permutations. And on top of that, I don't <em>need</em> to as far as I logically believe, query 'each' combination. As there are 792 possible 5 letter combinations from only 12 letters (without calculating repeating characters). So 792 query calls is not nice - and 792 OR statements in my query, is clearly not an option. LOL!. </p> <p>Any suggestions?</p> <p>I did just think about searching via available characters left from alphabet - but, some words have repeating letters so that's not an option either.</p>

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