Hi everyone I need to write a small search script for our admin site (and eventually for the "outsiders" too!). There's a text box where the user types in what they're searching for. It's easy enough to parse their string into an array and create the query from it, for example <user typed in HTML Java Oracle, separated by spaces> $s_a = explode(" ", $user_input); for ($s_a_i=0; $s_a_i<= sizeof($s_a); $s_a_i++) { $sql_text .= " column1 LIKE '%$s_a[$s_a_i]%' OR column2 LIKE '%$s_a[$S_a_i]%' AND "; } and then tidy it up by adding // remove trailing AND $sql_text = substr($sql_text, 0, strlen($sql_text)-4); // prepend start of sql command $sql_text = "SELECT id, columnx, columny FROM sometable WHERE " . $sql_text; and then running the query. However, what I need to be able to do is detect if people have typed in the words AND OR or NOT and handle them appropriately, also remembering that I'll be searching TWO columns in the table every time. Are there perhaps any functions I can get for this? Or is there a really easy way I can do it that's escaped (scuse the pun!) me? Many thanks in advance Dave