[RESOLVED] how to get the AUTO_INCREMENT as int

diotima

Hi!
I've got these two tables:

files(id, name, type, size, date, user_id)

users (id, username, password)

Now I want to store users.id into files.user_id in order to be able to do CROSS JOIN.

The problem is that in the following script:

/* Get the name of the user and find its id fro users table */
session_start();
$user = $_SESSION['username'];
$sql = "SELECT id FROM users WHERE username = '$user' LIMIT 1";
$username = mysql_query($sql);
echo $username;

I get : Resource id #4

and when I try to INSERT it into files.user_id (which is int), off course, it gives me an error.

Isn't it correct to use the primary key of users as secondary key to files?
But why the id isn't plain 4 (int)? Is there another way to get it?

Thank you very much.

dalecosp

Read the manual regarding [man]mysql_query/man --- what it actually returns is a database resource for you to use with something like [man]mysql_result/man, [man]mysql_fetch_row/man, [man]mysql_fetch_array/man, etc. etc.

HTH,

dalecosp

You asked your question well, by the way. Brownie point that gets you a picture to go with my 1000 words 😉

$sql = "SELECT id FROM users WHERE username = '$user' LIMIT 1";
$result=mysql_query($sql);
$username=mysql_result($res,0);

Note that, as the manual indicates, it's better to use something other than mysql_result if you need more than one piece of data from your RDBMS.

diotima

Wow! Unfortunately I hadn't notice about mysql_result.
Thank you very much dalecosp. It is exactly what I need.

laserlight

Tangential to this: have you considered using the MySQLi extension or the PDO extension instead?

diotima

Hey laserlight. Thank you for your recommendation.
I'm rather new in php and MySQL (I started studying on August) and I didn't know about MySQLi or PDO. I just saw now, after your post, that they are highly appreciated extensions, so I will definitely look into them.
Thanks!