Question

For years I’ve used mySQL. Big Mistake. PDO is definitely the way to go and I have learnt the hard way.

But I don’t quite understand it yet and am not finding the tutorials particularly helpful.

Security and speed are my too main issues with mySQL. What would a standard PDO formula look like if I wanted to say fetch information from

$variable1 - SQL TABLE
$variable2 - FIELD TO MATCH
$variable3 - MATCH WITH THIS

and then assuming that there are a given number of fields in each found row, once it is found presumably it would look something like $row['field_name'];

If I can see how this is done based on this example I think I can probably manage the rest.

Also if you know a good link for something like what w3schools does for mySQL queries but for PDO then I would appreciate it too.

Answer 1

Fully documented, it looks like this:

<?php

try {
//Start connection
    $pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=database_name", "user", "password");
/*
* Set attributes
*/
//Throw exceptions on errors
    $pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
//Disable prepared statements emulations
    $pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES, false);

    $table_name = "example_table";
    $field = "example_field";
    $value = "example_value";

    $query = <<<MySQL
    SELECT *
        FROM `$table_name`
        WHERE `$field` = :value
MySQL;

//Prepare the statement
    $stmt = $pdo->prepare($query);

//Bind values to placeholders
    $stmt->bindValue(":value", $value);

//Execute the statement
    $stmt->execute();

/*
* Fetching results
*/
//Fetch all results as an associative array.
    $result = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    die("An error has occurred! " . $e->getMessage());
}