Interesting question... Libraries traditionally use "Distillers, The" but really this is a hold over from the card catalogues where if they didn't do it that way the "T" section would be over half of the catalogue. Also it's easier for people to notice that the library puts the "the" second but looking for "The Distillers" and not finding any "The..." than it is to notice the opposite but searching for "Distillers ..." and not finding any.
But think beyond the card catalog... This is 2002 not 1802. How about a column title which is accurate (whatever is on the official album - er... CD or MP3 ID tag). But then have a second table with a word index. TitleIndex ------------- id int, type int, word varchar(80) Where id is the id of whatever used that word, type tells you what that was (in your case an artist name, album name or anything else you intend to track) and word is the lowercase (to make it case insensitive) word you're indexing. So if we have "The Distillers - Sing Sing Death House" and "The Grateful Dead - Terrapin Station" and "The Bobs - Cover Songs of ..." Your table might look like: id type word ---- ---- -------- 1 1 the 1 1 distillers 23 2 sing 23 2 sing 23 2 death 23 2 house 3 1 the 3 1 grateful 3 1 dead 12 2 terrapin 12 2 station 2 1 the 2 1 bobs 15 2 cover 15 2 songs 15 2 of 15 2 ... Isn't this more of a pain in the ass? Well yes but not that much and consider the huge benefits it can offer. You search on this table by breaking off of the words your end user submits into single words and do a group by sorting by count(*) desc -- you'll get relevance and if I searched for "Sing Sing Dead House" or "The Dead" -- which would fail under your design here we would find something (true "The Dead Kennedys" would rate as high as "The Grateful Dead" but they would both be there). If you add a third type for song titles you're really cooking now. Queries can be restricted by type and re-run if the first finds nothing. Good Luck, Frank On 2/24/02 10:19 PM, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: "Jonathan Underfoot" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 13:35:43 -0500 > To: "[PHP-DB]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: "The" Debacle > > I'm putting together a table with bands, and I have a slight problem. Well it > not really a problem as much as I'd like some input from more seasoned > professionals. Certain band names begin with "The" but when listing them it > would be of great advantge to me to remove the "the." Has anyone else faced > this dilemma? I was thinking that when inputting and editing band names that > I could just scripot a new column with the comma in place. I suppose librarys > have this difficulty as well. So what is it? > > Column 1 - "The Distillers" > Column 2 - "Distillers, The" > > Or a bit of PHP programming every time I list them (seems more difficult.) > > Either way, does anyone have the propper PHP function I should use? > > Thanks much... > > -Jonathan > -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
