simple mysql query

[Anon]

I'm new at this and I'm hung up on getting a simple query to work. Can anyone please explain why I'm getting these results?

This doesn't (but I thought it should) bring back any results:
$name = "homer";
// and I've tried $name = 'homer';
$sql ="SELECT * FROM User WHERE name=$name ";
$result = mysql_query( $sql , $dbName );

But this does:

$sql ="SELECT * FROM User WHERE name='homer' ";
$result = mysql_query( $sql , $dbName );

[jcleary]

The first query will be translated by PHP

select * from user where name=homer

So you need to tell php to put some quotes in like this

$sql = "select * from User where name = '$name'"

That should do it.