php/mysql account activation

Question

Everything in my new website is working just fine, except that I can\'t get this piece of code to work:

$query = mysql_query(\"SELECT * FROM members WHERE userem         


        

Answer 1

The error message suggests that your query is invalid:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM members WHERE useremail = '$useremail'");

Are you doing any input sanitization for $usermail?

Are you sure your database contains that table and that the table contains that column.

Try doing a little debugging:

$query = "SELECT * FROM members WHERE useremail = '$useremail'";
echo $query;

and try running the content of $query directly in your database (from phpMyAdmin or something).

Answer 2

Everything in my new website is working just fine

...until something goes wrong.

You have to learn how to handle errors.

run all your queries at least this way.

$query  = "SELECT * FROM members WHERE useremail = '$useremail'"
$result = mysql_query() or trigger_error(mysql_error()." ".$query);

and you always be notified of any error and it's reason

or implement any other way of error notifications, employing mysql_error() function which is the only thing in the world that can tell you where the actual problem is.

Answer 3

Change your first line to:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM members WHERE useremail = '$useremail'") or die(mysql_error());

And it will spit out the mysql error that is causing the Warning =)

You should not be presuming the call to mysql_query returns a valid result; It's good practice to always test the result first, e.g.

$r=mysql_query("SELECT * YADYADA");
if($r && mysql_num_rows($r)>0){
  $row=mysql_fetch_assoc($r);
}else{
  //Uh oh, something's not right~~~ throw an exception maybe?
}