Question

I am trying to determine if any differences exist between a number of fields between rows of a mysql database.

for example, if name field is different in one row echo a result out.

What is the best method for this?

edit:

for example

Name          AGE
john smith    68
john smith    68
John M Smith  68

I would like a script that detect the name in the third line is different to the others but to be able to do this for both name and age fields

Answer 1

You first have to think about: Different to what? You always have to define a value a column should have. If you want all rows which are not “john smith” with age 68, your statement would be the following:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE name <> "john smith" AND age <> 68;

That will return all rows that are different to the defined values.

A very basic PHP code example would be the following:

$mysqli = new mysqli('hostname', 'username', 'password', 'database');

$query = 'SELECT * FROM table WHERE name <> "john smith" AND age <> 68';

if($result = $mysqli->query($query)){
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()){
        // do something with the results using $row['name'] and $row['age']
    }
}