Newbie needs help

Anon

I have been on this fourm for a while (3 days) and everyone has been really nice to help me out. Because I am a newbie and I also picked up this language in 1 week. But there are little things I cannot figure out for the life of me. So can someone help me on this? I have a db name of bpa, I have a table named main and I have two variables that will be set. A and B. A is the field name and B is what they want to find in the field. How would I go about doing that? Is it in the SQL statement or something? If so could someone give me a sql statement that would work? Thank you everyone who has helped me out these last couple days!
Chad R. Smith
President of Designcmc
www.designcmc.com

[deleted]

$server = "localhost";
$userid = "your username";
$pass = "you password";
$database = "bpa";

$con = mysql_connect("$server","$userid","$pass")
or die ("Connection Error to Server");
$db = mysql_select_db("$database",$con)
or die("Connection Error to Database");

$sql="SELECT A FROM main WHERE A = 'B'";

$query = mysql_query($sql, $con);
while ($result=mysql_fetch_array($query)){

$field_a = $result["A"];

echo "$field_a<br>";
}

This doesn't seem very logical though becuase your result will always be B. Do you want to find other fields in the records that have an B value in field A?

alfbennett

HEY!
They fixed the problem I was having fast.

Anyway, I think what he wanted to see was a query like this

$query = "SELECT $A FROM main WHERE $A='$B' ";

That would make the Column name variable and the selected value as well.

Hope that helps,
Alfred

Anon

Ok I am looking for them to input anything from a form. That would be variable B. Then I want them to specifiy a field name they want to find it in. That would be A. I want PHP to go out and find what they are looking for. Like if they want to find Chicago in a description. I want php to find every entry that contains Chicago in the field of description. Does that make any sense? But hope you guys understand. Thanks!
Chad

alfbennett

I think what I sent would work.

$query = "SELECT $A FROM main WHERE $A='$B' ";

where $A is input from a form and is the name of the field to search, and $B is also from in input and is the value to retrieve.

if you want to search for a close aproximation of $B instead of an exact match try this

$query = "SELECT $A FROM main WHERE $A LIKE '$B' ";
or
$query = "SELECT $A FROM main WHERE $A~~'$B' ";

Anon

Thank you alfred. It was much help! I notice you really know your stuff. Its good to see nice people. 🙂
Chad