Looking for a way to organize user inputed data into logical groups

[methodman]

I'm looking to build a web app that takes user data (string) and then assigns it to 1 of 8 groups automatically.

Example:

Input: "Milk"
Assigns to: Food
or
Input: "IKEA Chair"
Assigns to: Furniture

User's could be entering an extremely wide range of answers, which leaves holes in any conditional I write. I was wondering if anybody was aware of a better process for categorization that would account for unknown, but logically identifiable, strings.

**I'm very new to coding, but I've taught myself all of the fundamentals and important concepts.

[xelawho]

I was wondering if anybody was aware of a better process for categorization that would account for unknown, but logically identifiable, strings.

None that I can think of - a computer is very stupid compared to the human brain - what we think of as logical association is actually the result of being able to compare and associate very separate things. Therefore we know that an IKEA Chair is furniture, but for a computer to know this it would at least have to be told that all chairs are furniture (except for chairmen, chairlifts, maybe wheelchairs, etc).

I can't think of a way to easily categorize every possibility. The best you can do is categorize the most likely, and if a category for the new item is not found either put it in "miscellaneous" or ask the user to select a category.

[methodman]

thanks xelawho. I kinda figured that, but I didn't know for sure. I appreciate your advise, I'll probably just do that.

[johnny02]

yes he is right coz users may enter any value in the search area i think it will be better to ,make a menu and select items from lthat menu and than you can compare the item according to its category ....