Question

I have a script that follows that is supposed to collect data from a field”UserID” in my sql table, submit all data into an array, and then compare a variable to whats in the array. If the value of the variable is already in the array, tell the user that that value is invalid.

$sql = "SELECT *" //User info
    . " FROM Users" ;
$result = mysql_query($sql); 
//insert where line for assessorid


$users = array();

while(($user = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))) { 
$users[] = $user;
}

foreach($users as $user){ 
$user['UserID']; 
 }

I need the output of $users to be equivalent to array(‘user1′,’user2′,’user3’);
Whats happening is data comes in from a form as $user_name. I want to use this in a statement like follows:

if(in_array($user_name,$users)){
  echo "username available"
}
else{
  echo "not available"}

I tried using the extract function, but that just created a big mess.
Im not sure what is incorrect about what I’m doing, unless the format of $users as an array cannot be parsed in the in_array() function as it is formatted currently. Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Maybe I am missing something… Why not do it like this:

SELECT UserID FROM Users WHERE Username = 'username'

Then just use mysql_num_rows() to check if the username already exists or not. This should be both faster and more efficient (memory-wise).