This example shows how to connect, execute a query, use basic error handling, print resulting rows, and disconnect from a MySQL database.
This example uses the freely available Sakila database that can be downloaded from » dev.mysql.com, as described here. To get this example to work, (a) install sakila and (b) modify the connection variables (host, your_user, your_pass).
Example #1 MySQLi extension overview example
<?php
// Let's pass in a $_GET variable to our example, in this case
// it's aid for actor_id in our Sakila database. Let's make it
// default to 1, and cast it to an integer as to avoid SQL injection
// and/or related security problems. Handling all of this goes beyond
// the scope of this simple example. Example:
// http://example.org/script.php?aid=42
if (isset($_GET['aid']) && is_numeric($_GET['aid'])) {
$aid = (int) $_GET['aid'];
} else {
$aid = 1;
}
// Connecting to and selecting a MySQL database named sakila
// Hostname: 127.0.0.1, username: your_user, password: your_pass, db: sakila
$mysqli = new mysqli('127.0.0.1', 'your_user', 'your_pass', 'sakila');
// Oh no! A connect_errno exists so the connection attempt failed!
if ($mysqli->connect_errno) {
// The connection failed. What do you want to do?
// You could contact yourself (email?), log the error, show a nice page, etc.
// You do not want to reveal sensitive information
// Let's try this:
echo "Sorry, this website is experiencing problems.";
// Something you should not do on a public site, but this example will show you
// anyways, is print out MySQL error related information -- you might log this
echo "Error: Failed to make a MySQL connection, here is why: \n";
echo "Errno: " . $mysqli->connect_errno . "\n";
echo "Error: " . $mysqli->connect_error . "\n";
// You might want to show them something nice, but we will simply exit
exit;
}
// Perform an SQL query
$sql = "SELECT actor_id, first_name, last_name FROM actor WHERE actor_id = $aid";
if (!$result = $mysqli->query($sql)) {
// Oh no! The query failed.
echo "Sorry, the website is experiencing problems.";
// Again, do not do this on a public site, but we'll show you how
// to get the error information
echo "Error: Our query failed to execute and here is why: \n";
echo "Query: " . $sql . "\n";
echo "Errno: " . $mysqli->errno . "\n";
echo "Error: " . $mysqli->error . "\n";
exit;
}
// Phew, we made it. We know our MySQL connection and query
// succeeded, but do we have a result?
if ($result->num_rows === 0) {
// Oh, no rows! Sometimes that's expected and okay, sometimes
// it is not. You decide. In this case, maybe actor_id was too
// large?
echo "We could not find a match for ID $aid, sorry about that. Please try again.";
exit;
}
// Now, we know only one result will exist in this example so let's
// fetch it into an associated array where the array's keys are the
// table's column names
$actor = $result->fetch_assoc();
echo "Sometimes I see " . $actor['first_name'] . " " . $actor['last_name'] . " on TV.";
// Now, let's fetch five random actors and output their names to a list.
// We'll add less error handling here as you can do that on your own now
$sql = "SELECT actor_id, first_name, last_name FROM actor ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 5";
if (!$result = $mysqli->query($sql)) {
echo "Sorry, the website is experiencing problems.";
exit;
}
// Print our 5 random actors in a list, and link to each actor
echo "<ul>\n";
while ($actor = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
echo "<li><a href='" . $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] . "?aid=" . $actor['actor_id'] . "'>\n";
echo $actor['first_name'] . ' ' . $actor['last_name'];
echo "</a></li>\n";
}
echo "</ul>\n";
// The script will automatically free the result and close the MySQL
// connection when it exits, but let's just do it anyways
$result->free();
$mysqli->close();
?>