counting with mysql

[Anon]

how would you go about returning the number of rows that match a where statement in mysql?

i think i can think of a way to do it but it seems like theres most likely a command i'm missing or something.

[[deleted]]

Two options:

You can either run an SQL query that just returns the number of rows that match;

SELECT COUNT(1) AS numrows FROM table WHERE foo=bar;

or you can run the query and get the number in PHP (but this will fetch all rows and send them to PHP, which is a waste of resources if you only want the number of rows and not the rows themselves)

$result = mysql_query('SELECT foo WHERE bar');
echo $mysql_num_rows($result);