Question

I get an array of values returned from the following function:

function get_subscribitions($user)
{

$user = mysql_real_escape_string ($user);
$sql = "SELECT 'user_id' FROM `subscribe` WHERE subscriber = '$user'";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
$rows = array();   
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
   $rows[] = $row;
}    
mysql_free_result($result); 
return $rows;

I now want to use these values in a new function, where each “user_id” is used to collect text from the database through this function:

function get_text($writer) {
$writer = mysql_real_escape_string ($writer);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `text` WHERE user_id='$writer' ORDER BY timestamp desc";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
$rows = array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
   $rows[] = $row;
}

mysql_free_result($result);
return $rows;

However the returned value from the first function is an array, and as I’ve learnt the hard way, arrays cannot be treated by “mysql_real_escape_string”.

How can I make the second function handle the values that I got from the first function?

Any responses appreciated.
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Your first mistake is to use mysql_fetch_assoc when only selecting one column. You should use mysql_fetch_row for this. This is likely going to fix your primary problem.

Could look like this:

$subs = get_subscribitions($whateverId);
$texts = get_text($subs);

function get_subscribitions($user)
{
    $user = mysql_real_escape_string ($user);
    $sql = "SELECT 'user_id' FROM `subscribe` WHERE subscriber = '$user'";
    $result = mysql_query($sql);
    $rows = array();

    while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
        $user_id = $row['user_id'];
        $rows[$user_id] = $user_id;
    }
    mysql_free_result($result);
    return $rows;
}

function get_text($writer) {
    $writers = implode(",", $writer);
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM `text` WHERE user_id IN ({$writers}) ORDER BY timestamp DESC";
    $result = mysql_query($sql);
    $rows = array();

    while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
        $rows[] = $row;
    }

    mysql_free_result($result);
    return $rows;
}

This will save you a lot of time, because you can get all data from 'text' in one statement.