Programming PHP

PEAR DB Basics

Example 8-1 is a program to build an HTML table of information about James Bond movies. It demonstrates how to use the PEAR DB library (which comes with PHP) to connect to a database, issue queries, check for errors, and transform the results of queries into HTML. The library is object-oriented, with a mixture of class methods (DB::connect( ), DB::iserror( )) and object methods ($db->query( ), $q->fetchInto( )).

Example 8-1. Display movie information

<html><head><title>Bond Movies</title></head>
<body>
  
<table border=1>
<tr><th>Movie</th><th>Year</th><th>Actor</th></tr>
<?php
 // connect
 require_once('DB.php');
 $db = DB::connect("mysql://bondview:007@localhost/webdb");
 if (DB::iserror($db)) {
   die($db->getMessage(  ));
 }
  
 // issue the query
 $sql = "SELECT movies.title,movies.year,actors.name
         FROM movies,actors
         WHERE movies.actor=actors.id
         ORDER BY movies.year ASC";
  
 $q = $db->query($sql);
 if (DB::iserror($q)) {
   die($q->getMessage(  ));
 }
  
 // generate the table
 while ($q->fetchInto($row)) {
?>
<tr><td><?= $row[0] ?></td>
    <td><?= $row[1] ?></td>
    <td><?= $row[2] ?></td>
</tr>
<?php
 }
?>

The output of Example 8-1 is shown in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1. The movie page

Data Source Names

A data source name (DSN) is a string that specifies where the database is located, what kind of database it is, the username and password to use when connecting to the database, and more. The ...