Fetching a single field from a MySQL database

redneck

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing trying to get rows of information from a MySQL database, but now that I'm just trying to get one little field from a database I'm stumped.

Here's a code sample:

$connection = connect_db(); // call a user-defined function for this, works fine
$username = "rocky";

// note the following query works fine from the MySQL command line 
// (substituting the var of course)
// it normally returns an integer, the user_id
$query = "SELECT user_id FROM users WHERE user_name = '$username'";
$result = mysql_query($query, $connection); // no errors here

// so now how do I get that user_id from $result?
while ($row = msql_fetch_array($result))
        $user_id = $row['user_id'];

The above all works fine up to the last command. I'm not sure an array is returned at all, since all I'm supposed to get back from the query is a single integer. I've tried noodling around without the "loop" and using subscripts, but so far nothing gets it out.

I'm sure it's simple. What do I need to do?

ultraslacker

You are just assigning it in the code shown.


while ($row = msql_fetch_array($result)) {

    $user_id = $row['user_id'];
echo $user_id;
}

redneck

I am assigning what?

Making the assignment to $row works fine elsewhere in the program.

I don't see the need for the loop.

And I don't see a difference between my code and yours. Was there meant to be?

Thanks.

Lars_Berg

while ($row = msql_fetch_array($result))

Shouldn't that rather be

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))

redneck

Holy cow, that was it.

Very frustrating because the typo must also appear in by TextPad configuration, since the function "msql_fetch_array" was colored like a recognized function in my editor. Gotta fix that.

Thanks for the sharp eyes.