Web Database Applications with PHP, and MySQL

Formatting Results

So far in this chapter we have shown the basic techniques for connecting to and querying a MySQL DBMS using PHP. In this section, we extend this to produce results with embedded HTML that have both better structure and presentation.

Let’s consider an example that presents results in an HTML <table> environment. Example 4-6 shows a script to query the winestore database and present the details of wines. Previously, in Example 4-5, the details of wines were displayed by wrapping the output in HTML <pre> tags. The script in Example 4-6 uses the function displayWines( ) to present the results as an HTML <table>. The main body of the script has a similar structure to previous examples, with the exceptions that the query is stored in a variable, and the username, password, and the showerror( ) function are stored in separate files and included in the script with the include directive. We introduced the include directive in Chapter 2 and discuss it in more detail later in this section.

The displayWines( ) function first outputs a <table> tag, followed by a table row <tr> tag with six <th> header tags and descriptions matching the six attributes of the wine table. We could have output these using mysql_fetch_field( ) to return the attribute names rather than hardcoding the heading names. However, in most cases, the headers are hardcoded because attribute names are less meaningful to users than manually constructed textual descriptions.

Example 4-6. Producing simple ...