Question

I have a database table which contains an unsigned integer field to store the visitor’s IP address:

`user_ip` INT(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL,

Here’s the snippet of PHP code which tries to store the IP address:

$ipaddr = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
if ($stmt = mysqli_prepare($dbconn, 'INSERT INTO visitors(user_email, user_ip) VALUES (?,?)'))
{
    $remote_ip = "INET_ATON('$ipaddr')";
    mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, 'ss', $email, $remote_ip);
    if (mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt) === FALSE) return FALSE;
    $rows_affected = mysqli_stmt_affected_rows($stmt);
    mysqli_stmt_close($stmt);
}

The INSERT operation succeeds, however the user_ip field contains a null value.
I have also tried changing the parameter type in mysqli_stmt_bind_param() (which was set to string in the above example) to integer, i.e. mysqli_bind_param(… ‘si’,…) – but to no avail.

I’ve also tried using the following bit of code instead of mysql’s INET_ATON() SQL function:

function IP_ATON($ipaddr)
{
    $trio = intval(substr($ipaddr,0,3));
    return ($trio>127) ? ((ip2long($ipaddr) & 0x7FFFFFFF) + 0x80000000) : ip2long($ipaddr);
}

It still doesn’t work – the ‘user_ip’ field is still set to null. I’ve tried passing the $ip_addr variable as both integer & string in mysqli_bind_param() – to no avail.

It seems the problem lies with the parameterized insert.

The following “old-style” code works without any problem:

mysqli_query(..., "INSERT INTO visitors(user_email, user_ip) VALUES ('$email',INET_ATON('$ipaddr'))");

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I think it should look like this:

$ipaddr = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
if ($stmt = mysqli_prepare($dbconn, 'INSERT INTO visitors(user_email, user_ip) VALUES (?, INET_ATON(?))'))
{
    mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, 'ss', $email, $ipaddr);
    if (mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt) === FALSE) return FALSE;
    $rows_affected = mysqli_stmt_affected_rows($stmt);
    mysqli_stmt_close($stmt);
}

Note the change by the second ? and what parameters are sent into mysqli_stmt_bind_param.

Since the parameters you pass into mysqli_stmt_bind_param should be the actual values to be inserted, and not any functions.