Question

Can you guys find anything wrong with this php code? I always get the “Error: Could not show columns” message, but when I try the query “show columns from recipes like ‘Book'” in the MySQL Command Line Client it works just fine.

I got this code snippet from one of the comments in the section on Sets in the MySQL Reference Manual. It’s supposed to get all possible values of a Set and store them in an array.

<?php
    $query = "SHOW COLUMNS FROM recipes LIKE 'Book'";
    if (!($ret = mysql_query($query)))
        die("Error: Could not show columns");
    $line = mysql_fetch_assoc($ret);
    $set = $line['Type'];
    $set = substr($set,5,strlen($set)-7);
    $options = preg_split("/','/",$set);
?>

Perhaps there is another way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Looks like you haven’t selected a database using mysql_select_db.

Try changing your die statement to:

die("Error: Could not show columns - ". mysql_error());`

Make sure to remove this before moving your code to production.