Please help, MYSQL_FETCH_ARRAY confusing

[Anon]

<?php
mysql_connect ($host, $user, $password);
$result = mysql_db_query ("database","select user_id, fullname from table");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array ($result)) {
echo "user_id: ".$row["user_id"]."<br>\n";
echo "user_id: ".$row[0]."<br>\n";
echo "fullname: ".$row["fullname"]."<br>\n";
echo "fullname: ".$row[1]."<br>\n";
}
mysql_free_result ($result);
?>

Here's what I don't understand.. it's basically that weird array.. the $row["user_id"] how is it that each time in the loop that the value of $row["user_id"] turns out to be the next entry from the database? Now i'm guessing the fetch_array function made an array for each field using $row correct? so what I dont understand is how the output array comes out to.. I understand array's like $blah[1]. So if it did make an array like $row["user_id"] where do you specify the number of the array you want? when you access user_id like this does it automatically just get the first entry in this field and automatically switch to the next field in this loop? what would $row[0] equal to? as you can see i'm quite confused, please help me!

[sand2005]

hai..

In this example $row will have the whole record..i.e all the column values for that particular row..so..$row[0] will give the first column value..i.e user_id ..in your case..it does get it automatically..$row[0]..does not mean first row..it means first column of the current row..I hope ur confusion is solved now..

[docdunning]

And ... php has 'associative' arrays where instead of using a numeric index like $row[0], $row[4] etc, you can use key values to get at the same entries. When you use mysql_fetch_array, php loads the column names as index values for the array of fields in each row, one row for each call. So you can use either the numeric indices or the column names, whichever suits the code better.

[[deleted]]

mysql_fetch_array() gets one record from a resultset and returns either an array or an associative array.

An associative array is just like a normal array but instead of numbers you can also use strings to identify elements.

so if you do $row=mysql_fetch_array() then $row will contain an array that holds the data for one record.

When you use the WHILE loop, you make the script
loop untill there are no more records to fetch.

As long as I can fetch a record...

while ($row=mysql_fetch_array())
{

Do something with this one record

print field "id" from the array

echo $row["id"];
}