Hi,

I got this strange situation here...
In the following code, I'm just normally retrieving a data from my database.

Given $first_name should be 'php' according to the database, I expected a result output:
In database
php

But instead I get:
In database
Resource id #2


Anyone know what's wrong with my code? Don't know what Resource id #2 means.

//connect server and select database 
$link = mysql_connect($db_host,$db_user,$db_pass) or die ('Unable to connect to SQL server.'); 
mysql_select_db($db_name) or die ('Unable to locate' . $db_name . ' database'); 

$str='phpisgood'; 
$first_name = mysql_query("SELECT first_name FROM php_exercise2 WHERE username = '$str'"); 
if (mysql_num_rows($first_name)==0) { 
echo 'News type not in database.' . "\n"; 
} 
else{ 
echo "In database\n"; 
echo $first_name;

Hey,

By using $first_name like that you are just grabbing the true|false result. You need to do this:

$result=mysql_query("SELECT first_name FROM php_exercise2 WHERE username = '$str'");

$row=mysql_fetch_array($result);

echo $row['first_name'];


In order to access data in a mysql database you need to access the array sent back from the query. in PHP you use the "mysql_fetch_array" function.

Hope it helps