particular attribute value, as in whether it should be greater than or equal to, less than or 

equal to or exactly equal to the current search criterion. 

What is missing from the current XML design is metadata, in effect data types, that the 

program  could  use  to  distinguish  between   2100   meaning   2100,  9pm  or  the  part 

number of some computer accessory. For example: 

Dell 

Inspiron 

2100 

 or  

Bob`s Plumbers 

01 2345678 

0600 1800 

1000 1600 

 would be a much more sensible way of encoding the data. Time simply ran out before 

a parser for this XML structure could be fully implemented. Tweaking the startElement(), 

grep()  and  test_line()  functions  in  parse2.inc  would  be  straightforward;  all  of  the 

intellectual  effort  required  to  conceptualise  the  algorithm  first  time  around  is  second 

nature at this stage. However, rather than running the risk of ending up with half finished 

code,  I  have  opted  to  submit  the  older,  functional  version     albeit  less  truly  functional 

than the version just described. 

The last significant piece of code in multishop.php is included from lm.inc, which prints 

the  panel  on  the  left  of  the  page  and  generates  the  simple  search  form.  The  form 

generating code is in a further nested include file called genmultiform.inc. As in any of 

the   smart  form   includes  such  as  genericproductform.inc  which  are  deployed  on 

queries.php, the first piece of PHP code generates a series of hidden form inputs, one for 

each shop name, in this case from the array $shops[]. Next, a $fields array is declared and 

populated  by  scanning  through  all  of  the  possible  attribute  names  in  $shopsarray[]. 

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