Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Accessing Information

Now that we can add information to a database, we need to look at strategies for retrieving the information it contains. As you might guess, you can use mysql_query() to make a SELECT query. How do you use this to look at the returned rows, though? When you perform a successful SELECT query, mysql_query() returns a result resource. You can pass this resource to other functions to access and gain information about a resultset.

Finding the Number of Rows Found by a Query

You can find the number of rows returned as a result of a SELECT query using the mysql_num_rows() function. mysql_num_rows() requires a result resource and returns a count of the rows in the set. Listing 13.4 uses a SQL SELECT statement to request all rows ...