Syntax Error

[hozdaman]

Hi,

I'm learning php from a book I purchased and I was following one of the examples that was written and I can not figure out what's wrong.

Here is the error message

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 6

Here is the code

//take in the id of a director and return his/her full name
function get_director($director_id) {
  global $db;

$query = 'SELECT
        people_fullname
   FROM
       people
   WHERE
       people_id = ' . $director_id;
$results = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results);
extract($row);

return $people_fullname;
}

//take in the id of a lead actor and return his/her full name
function get_leadactor($leadactor_id) {

global $db;

$query= 'SELECT
			people_fullname
		FROM
			people
		WHERE
			people_id = ' . $leadacor_id;
$results=mysql_query($query) or die (mysql_error());

$row =mysql_fetch_assoc($results);
extract($row);

return $people_fullname;
}

//take in the the id of a movie type and return the meaningful textual
//description
function get_movietype($type_id) {
	global $db;

$query ='SELECT
			movietype_label
		FROM
			movietype
		WHERE
			movietype_id= ' .$type_id;

$results=mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

$row =mysql_fetch_assoc($results);
extract($row);

return $movietype_label;
}

[bradgrafelman]

As I suggested in the parse error thread, print out the SQL query string (e.g. $query) when an error occurs so you can visually examine it for missing values (e.g. undefined/empty variables).

[cahva]

That error comes because of there is a spelling error on the variablename and the query is not getting the id.

function get_leadactor($leadactor_id) {

..then later you use $leadacor_id in the query.

I hope this is not straight from the book as the 2 first functions are identical(same query, same return, just function name and variable name changes). You could easily combine that to more general one for example:

function get_person($id = FALSE)
{
	if (!$id)
	{
		return FALSE;
	}

$query = 'SELECT people_fullname FROM people WHERE people_id = '.$id;
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

return $row['people_fullname'];
}

BTW, youi dont have to use global $db. Mysql will work inside functions if the connection is open. Also that extract function was just an extra that you wont need as you can return the exact field name inside the row as in my example.

[hozdaman]

@
I have printed the lines and getting another that I will see if I can figure out. Thanks Doing this really helps see whats going when the script is running.

@
I will fix that, thanks. It should be $leadacor_id, because when I created the initial table I misspelled the word and haven't figured out how to fix it. I'm worried that if I run the script again with the correct spelling I will get an error saying the table already exists, right?

I was thinking the samething about combining the function since I am learning this and have no coding experience I was trying to follow the book examples as much as possible.

I will try this.

Thanks again for the help

[johanafm]

SQL code to handle this, taken from MySQL 5.1 documentation for ALTER TABLE syntax

ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN leadacor_id leadactor_id INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY

assuming of course that the field is indeed unsigned integer and set as primary key.

You could also issue a DROP TABLE tablename and then recreate the table from scratch (but would then of course lose all data in the table)