Fig. 5: Detail of the  smart  computer form and the three businesses with shops that it 

will be querying 

The first thing to do is to split the string into its two parts, namely the search criteria and 

the  shops  we  will  be  searching  through.  The  first  function  defined  in  multishop.php 

takes in the raw query string and splits it up into two arrays. The criteria array ($mcrits[]) 

is a plain two dimensional array or, in simpler terms, an array of pairs. 

Array (  

[0] => Array ( 

[0] => MAKE  

[1] => compaq  

)  

[1] => Array ( 

[0] => PRICE 

[1] => 2500  

) 

) 

The second array ($shops[]), is an array of the locations of each of the XML files. 

39