I’m going to show you a small but useful function that is handy to keep in your toolbox today, it’s called mysql_get_var.

This function lets you run a SQL query, and only return the variable you choose.

Here’s the function:

function mysql_get_var($query,$y=0){
	$res = mysql_query($query);
	$row = mysql_fetch_array($res);
	mysql_free_result($res);
	$rec = $row[$y];
	return $rec;
}

Now, let’s talk about what it does.

When you call this function, like for example here:

$name = mysql_get_var("SELECT name from people where email = 'roger@freekrai.net'");

You will return the name field, so what gets returned will be “Roger” (if that was my name in the database).

Now, you may notice that this function had a second argument called $y, this is so that you can choose which variable to return when your query has multiple fields:

$city = mysql_get_var("SELECT name,address,city from people where email = 'roger@freekrai.net'",2);

In the example above, I told it to return the 2nd argument, which due to PHP starting off arrays with a 0, would actually be the 3rd argument, so it returns the city of the person selected.

This function is only for returning 1 field from 1 row to a time, so if there are more rows, this wouldn’t be as useful, but it does work well for grabbing say a user’s name everytime they log in, or some similar function.