'Select *' not working in PHP

Angel_Dust

Hi I've have been doing at bit of PHP at home and have been going OK until today.
For some reason this:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM films WHERE title='Annie Hall'");

will come up with nothing when I try to display the results but this:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT title, director, year, rating, comment FROM films WHERE title = 'Annie Hall'");

works perfectly. It's not really any more trouble to use the second one but it seems that the first should work and I would like to figure it out now rather than just shrugging it off and continuing with the less elegant solution.

NogDog

I know of no reason why either should not work. Assuming there is not some trivial spelling error or such, all I can suggest is to show us how you are accessing the query results, or otherwise determining that the query "will come up with nothing".

Angel_Dust

Heres the code:

$query = "SELECT title, director, year, rating, comment FROM films WHERE title = '".$filmtitle."'";
echo $query;
$result = mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

echo "<h1>".$row['title']."</h1></br>";
echo $row['director'];
echo "</br>".$row['year'];
echo "</br>".$row['rating'];
echo "</br>".$row['comment'];

the 'echo $query' is there just so I could check that the query strinf was coming out OK. As it is the above it all comes out correctly but it I make it 'SELECT *' you see nothing except the query string and if you go 'view source' the html tags for <h1>, </br> etc are there too.

PS. How do you do that thing that makes php code in a post have syntax highlighting?

dougal85

Angel Dust wrote:
PS. How do you do that thing that makes php code in a post have syntax highlighting?

[ p h p ] put your code between tags like this [ / p h p ]

NogDog

Just to help nail down where the problem is, you might want to try:

// make sure all errors/warnings are displayed:
ini_set('display_errors');
error_reporting(E_ALL);

$query = "SELECT title, director, year, rating, comment FROM films WHERE title = '".$filmtitle."'";
echo $query;
// die with debug info if MySQL rejects your query:
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed: " . mysql_error() . "<br>$query");
// see if we actually got any data from the query:
if(mysql_num_rows($result) == 0)
{
   echo "ERROR: query returned no rows";
}
else
{
   $row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
   // add a little more debug output to see what the fetch returned:
   echo "<pre>DEBUG:\n" . print_r($row, 1) . "</pre>\n";
   echo "<h1>".$row['title']."</h1></br>";
   echo $row['director'];
   echo "</br>".$row['year'];
   echo "</br>".$row['rating'];
   echo "</br>".$row['comment'];
}

Angel_Dust

:o Oh man what a dumbass thing to do!
Using your code I was able to pinpoint that the echo['title'] parts of the code were supposed to be echo['Title']. When I did the "Select title, director etc" it meant that the array indexes where defined with the all lowercase names but with "Select *" it uses the database column names which I forgot actually started with an uppercase letter.
Thanks alot for the help.