How can the search functionality be improved to handle edge cases in PHP?

When implementing a search functionality in PHP, it's important to consider edge cases such as empty search queries or special characters. To handle these cases, you can sanitize the input, check for empty queries, and use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks. Additionally, you can implement error handling to provide meaningful feedback to users when edge cases occur. 

// Example code snippet to handle edge cases in search functionality in PHP

// Get the search query from the user input
$search_query = isset($_GET['search']) ? $_GET['search'] : '';

// Sanitize the input to prevent SQL injection
$search_query = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $search_query);

// Check if the search query is empty
if(empty($search_query)){
    echo "Please enter a valid search query";
} else {
    // Perform the search query using prepared statements
    $stmt = $connection->prepare("SELECT * FROM products WHERE name LIKE ?");
    $stmt->bind_param("s", $search_query);
    $stmt->execute();
    
    // Handle search results
    $result = $stmt->get_result();
    if($result->num_rows > 0){
        while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()){
            // Display search results
        }
    } else {
        echo "No results found for your search query";
    }
}

Keywords

search functionality edge cases PHP error handling optimization

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