PDO fetch one column from table into 1-dimensional array

Question

I\'m fairly new to PDO and getting them to work with MySQL. I seem to be getting on alright with inserting new data and retriving single results however this I am stuck with

Answer 1

<?php
$sql = "SELECT `ingredient_name` FROM `ingredients`";
$ingredients = $pdo->query($sql)->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_COLUMN);

Answer 2

you have to foreach or while through your fetched rows:

foreach ($ingredient_stmt->fetchAll() as $row) {
var_dump($row);
}

while ($row = $ingredient_stmt->fetch()) {
var_dump($row);
}

both are kinda equivalent, foreach generates a bigger memory load as you're loading a bigger array, whereas while gets one row at a time

notice how to use fetch and fetchAll; the former is for while, moving through each row one at a time, the latter is targeted to foreach, where the array must be known beforehand