how many entries?

boombanguk

Hi,

noob question I'm afriad. How can I get how many entries there are in my mysql database? Would I use select or count somehow?

thanks for any help
boombanguk

Sxooter

select count(*) from sometable where somefield=something

leave off the where clause for a complete listing.

count(*) is a special case that returns the count of rows returned, whether there's nulls in them or not.

boombanguk

ok cool thanks, and how would I put that result into an echo statement??

Sxooter

You might wanna look into a tutorial on how to use a database. The mysql functions section of the php docs have some simple examples to show you things like that.

Basically, you create the query, execute it with something like mysql_query, then get the result with one of the functions to grab data from a result set, like mysql_result(), and pass that var to an echo command. In fact, the first page of the mysql extension has the basics I talk of here:

mysql

boombanguk

this is the code I tried, and its not working

$query = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $table");
$numberOfEntries = mysql_result($query);
echo "&numberofentries=$numberOfEntries";

Sxooter

In this:

$numberOfEntries = mysql_result($query);
echo "&numberofentries=$numberOfEntries";

$numberOfEntries is a result handle. It doesn't have the actual results, but a pointer to those results. you need to use something like mysql_result or mysql_fetch_assoc.

look up the entry for mysql_result() in the php docs and you'll see the step you're missing there.

boombanguk

ok im confused. I thought I needed to use the mysql_result on the var that came back from the mysql_query ?

boombanguk

i just did this

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $table");
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($query);

and that seems to work.

bradgrafelman

Sure, that'll work, but there's no reason to SELECT all of the data in a table. In fact, on MyISAM table (I think), a COUNT(*) has some optimization gains.

All Sxooter is saying is that $numberOfEntries isn't a number - it's a resource handler pointing to the query you just ran. Using [man]mysql_result/man on that handler will retrieve data from the result set.