Originally posted by madcat
When you create a MySQL table and supply your field names, do the field names automatically become usable as PHP variables?
No.
You make a query to the database and the results are generally put into an array. You could use them straight out of the array or put the values into variables. Depending on what you are doing one method might work out better than another.
Take a look at
[man]mysql_fetch_array[/man]
[man]mysql_result[/man]
for more info