[RESOLVED] Take name/value pair from db and make one variable of each.

Siggles

This is probably really easy but for some reason I am struggling.

My database table 'configs' has the columns 'config_name' & 'config_value'

and rows such as the following....

TRACK_VISITORS 1
REQUIRE_VALIDATION 0

Basically a config table in a database and the 0 and 1 will represent true and false.

I want to pull the data from the database eg,

SELECT * FROM configs

and I want to iterate through the resulting array but assign the config_value to a variable named after the config_name.

So a new variable $TRACK_VISITORS is created with value 1.

Please help.

bradgrafelman

For one, don't use 'SELECT *' - instead, list the columns from which you actually need data (even if this is all columns in the table at the moment).

Second, what you're wanting could be accomplished with a technique called 'variable variables' (see: [man]variables.variable[/man]).

However, what happens if you add a config name that suddenly clashes with a variable you've chosen (or the opposite - you choose a variable that suddenly clashes with a config name you're using)? The answer is most likely: bad things happen.

For that reason, you might instead consider building an array where the key is the config name and the value is the value from the DB (e.g. $CFG['TRACK_VISITORS'] would have a value of 1).

Siggles

Thanks Brad,

In the end I did the following with variable variables as you suggested...

$q = "SELECT * FROM ".TBL_CONFIGURATION;
$result = mysql_query($q, $database->connection);
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
$$row['config_name'] = $row['config_value'];
}

dagon

per previous comments this would probably be safer more robust etc

$q = "SELECT * FROM ".TBL_CONFIGURATION;
$result = mysql_query($q, $database->connection);
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
$confg[$row['config_name']] = $row['config_value'];
}

Siggles

Thank you for your comments, I did in fact follow your advice, I also looked to phpbb.com and how they incorporate/include their config table in to their pages. I ended up with this...

 function getConfigs(){
   $config = array();
   $q = "SELECT * FROM ".TBL_CONFIGURATION;
   	  $result = mysql_query($q, $this->connection);
   	  while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
   	  	$config[$row['config_name']] = $row['config_value'];
   	  }
   	  return $config;
   }

Works well now, the whole idea behind this was I took a script using a page with a lot of constants and put those in to a database, now I can edit the choices, eg, turn off/on user authentication using an admin page rather than hard coding the constants page.