Codeigniter orLike() - PHP

Introduction

Codeigniter is a powerful PHP framework that offers various query building methods to simplify the database operations. In this article, we will discuss the orLike() method of Codeigniter that can be used to perform OR operations on multiple LIKE clauses.

Method Signature

orLike($field, $match = '', $side = 'both', $escape = NULL)

Parameters

The orLike() method accepts 4 parameters:

• $field: The name of the table column to perform the search on.
• $match: The search string to match against the column data. Defaults to empty string.
• $side: Specifies the side of the column data to match the search string. The possible values are 'before', 'after', and 'both'. Defaults to 'both'.
• $escape: Specifies whether to escape special characters in the search string or not. Defaults to NULL.

Example

Let's assume we have a table users with columns id, name, and email. We want to search for users whose name contains "john" or email contains "john". We can achieve this using orLike() method as follows:

$this->db->select('*');
$this->db->from('users');
$this->db->group_start();
$this->db->like('name', 'john');
$this->db->orLike('email', 'john');
$this->db->group_end();
$query = $this->db->get();

Explanation

In the above example, we first select all columns from the users table. Then we start a group to perform the OR operations using group_start() method. Inside the group, we use the like() method to match the name column with the search string "john". Then we use the orLike() method to perform OR operation on the email column with the search string "john". Finally, we end the group using group_end() method.

Conclusion

The orLike() method of Codeigniter can be very useful when we need to perform multiple OR operations on the LIKE clauses. It simplifies the query building process and makes it easy to perform complex database operations.