[Resolved] Query with Variable from URL

artnow

Hello all. This has got me stumped and I can't seem to figure out what's wrong. I want to use a variable found in a URL --
http://www.blah.com?sub_cat=abcd

$sql = 'SELECT cat,type,image,url,description FROM ke_summary WHERE sub_cat="$sub_cat"';

I don't get any results but if I instead use "abcd" in place of "$sub_cat" it works fine.

bastien

you need to use $_GET['varname'] to access a value from the url

so:

$sql = 'SELECT cat,type,image,url,description FROM ke_summary WHERE sub_cat=' ".$_GET['sub_cat']." ' ";

note that the single quotes are around the $sub_cat

$sub_cat=$_GET['sub_cat'];

$sql = 'SELECT cat,type,image,url,description FROM ke_summary WHERE sub_cat="$sub_cat"';

hth

artnow

Just before you answered I tried from scratch once again and found that the following also works.

$sql = "SELECT * FROM ke_summary WHERE sub_cat='$sub_cat'";

Thanks for the help!

bastien

the thing to note then is that the register_globals is set to on...generally this means that you are on an older version of php or the register_globals was turned on explicitly..it was turned off for security purposes

the new 'recommeded' way is to use $GET,$POST, $_COOKIE etc to access variables placed using those methods...

artnow

Well, I'll take the recommended route then since somebody might change the php server settings. Thanks for your help. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get the results into a table with a limited number of rows and multiple columns (depending on the number of results from the query).

bastien

if you want to limit the number of rows returned use the LIMIT clause

ie. select * from mytable limit 10

would return 10 rows

the columns can be handled with a for loop to iterate thru the result set columns and echo out the colum name or give them column names that may make more sense....

ie
for ($x=0;$x<count(mysql_field_name($result));$x++){
echo "<th>".mysql_field_name($result,[$x]);
}

hth