select and echo a single field from mysql db using PHP

Question

Im trying to select the title column from a particular row

$eventid = $_GET[\'id\'];
$field = $_GET[\'field\'];
$result = mysql_query(\"SELECT $field FROM `event         


        

Answer 1

Try this:

echo mysql_result($result, 0);

This is enough because you are only fetching one field of one row.

Answer 2

And escape your values with mysql_real_escape_string since PHP6 won't do that for you anymore! :)

Answer 3

Read the manual, it covers it very well: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-query.php

Usually you do something like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  echo $row['firstname'];
  echo $row['lastname'];
  echo $row['address'];
  echo $row['age'];
}

Answer 4

$eventid = $_GET['id'];
$field = $_GET['field'];
$result = mysql_query("SELECT $field FROM `events` WHERE `id` = '$eventid' ");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
echo $row[$field];

but beware of sql injection cause you are using $_GET directly in a query. The danger of injection is particularly bad because there's no database function to escape identifiers. Instead, you need to pass the field through a whitelist or (better still) use a different name externally than the column name and map the external names to column names. Invalid external names would result in an error.