You are getting this result because you have all of those ORs in your statement. If any of them are true it will execute the query. If location finds a match ('$location' = location) it will execute the query regardless of whether discipline was empty or simply did not match. It is generally a bad idea to use logic like this in a query if there are ambiguities.
You can get the results you are looking for by using the following query: $sql = "SELECT * FROM vacancy WHERE '$related_discipline' LIKE related_discipline and '$location' LIKE location ORDER BY ID LIMIT $limitvalue1, $limit"; Then make the value of your first option (the one which indicates no selection) in the html form = "%". Now if a selection is made using both variables and the selection does not find any relevant rows you will get an empty result. Fred <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > Hi group, > > I am still getting to grips with PHP and MySQL and have a question that hopefully someone can easily answer: > > I have a search page which consists of two drop down menus, the user has 3 ways of finding information. > > The first is by selecting a location and a discipline which would look in the database and return any entries with the data in the two seperate fields. > > The second is where they can select the location only, and this will return all entries with that location > > The third is where they can select the discipline only, and again this will return all entries with that discipline. > > The problem I have is when the user selects the location and a discipline which should return no results as it is not an exact match it is returning results as it contains part of the information. > > My sql query is as follows: $sql = "SELECT * FROM vacancy WHERE ('$related_discipline' = related_discipline and '$location' = location) or ('$related_discipline' = related_discipline) or ('$location' = location) ORDER BY ID LIMIT $limitvalue1, $limit"; > > Could someone tell me what I need to change? > > Again help is always appreciated. > -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]