Our final chapter looks at calling a row from our mysql database. To begin lets look at our code in full so far. For an explanations on how the code works, see part 1 through 4.

<?php
$hostname = "localhost";
$database = "db_ryanpartington.com";
$username = "ryan";
$password = "$ecr3t";
$mysqlconnection = mysql_pconnect($hostname, $username, $password) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);
mysql_select_db($database, $mysqlconnection);
?>

We've all our varialbes for a successful database connection, lets query some data.

<?php
$customquery1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tbl_articles WHERE id = 150", $mysqlconnection) or die(mysql_error());
$prepare1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($customquery1);
echo $prepare1['article_title'];
?>

The code broken down

<?php - Opening the php tag

$customquery1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tbl_articles WHERE id = 150", $mysqlconnection) or die(mysql_error()); - Defining a variable using the 'mysql_query()' function. The first part is a text string selecting all columns from the tbl_articles table within our database and then filtering the row where column id has a value of 150. We then use a predefined variable $mysqlconnection to connect to the database. If this connection fails stop processing php code (die) and echo out the error message.

$prepare1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($customquery1); - Define a variable called $prepare1 which will use the 'mysql_fetch_assoc()' function to fetch a result row as an associative array. Don't worry about this too much at the moment.

echo $prepare1['article_title']; - Echos out to the webpage the value within the 'article_title' column of the table. We call also use 'var_dump($prepare1);' to echo all the values stored within the array. Again, lets not worry too much about that now.

?> - Close PHP tag

Lets take a look at what our table may look like within the mysql database

With the above code the webpage would simply display 'How to create a webpage'

All the code together:-

<?php
$hostname = "localhost";
$database = "db_ryanpartington.com";
$username = "ryan";
$password = "$ecr3t";
$mysqlconnection = mysql_pconnect($hostname, $username, $password) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);
mysql_select_db($database, $mysqlconnection);

$customquery1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tbl_articles WHERE id = 150", $mysqlconnection) or die(mysql_error());
$prepare1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($customquery1);
echo $prepare1['article_title'];
?>

Cheers
Ryan Partington