Question

I have a table (wp_postmeta), which contains four columns (meta_id, post_id, meta_key, meta_value). meta_key contains a field called neighborhood_value and the values for neighborhood_value are stored under the meta_value column. How do I retrieve the contents of neighborhood_value from my table and use them as a variable? Any support is appreciated

Answer 1

Ok, as everything is meta, thecode will also be “meta” 🙂

UPDATE – now when I know what you use to connect to DB I can change my answer to be more specific.

global $wpdb;

$sql = "SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE post_id=XXX";

$retMeta = array();
$results = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

foreach ($results as $resultRow)
{
    if (!isset($retMeta[$resultRow['meta_key']]))
    {
        $retMeta[$resultRow['meta_key']] = array();
    }
    $retMeta[$resultRow['meta_key']][] = $resultRow['meta_value'];
}

The resulting $retMeta will be two dimensional array, and then you will be able to access your neighbourhood value by using $retMeta[‘neighbourhood_value’][0] (of course first you have to check if this is set – isset($retMeta['neighbourhood_value'])).

UPDATE2

For script imporing data, it’ll look like that:

$sql = "SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id=XXX";

$retMeta = array();
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while ($resultRow= mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
    if (!isset($retMeta[$resultRow['meta_key']]))
    {
        $retMeta[$resultRow['meta_key']] = array();
    }
    $retMeta[$resultRow['meta_key']][] = $resultRow['meta_value'];
}
mysql_free_result($result);

But you should use WP_Query anyway, to maintain portability (the wp_postmeta doesn’t have to be named that way, it can be wp2_postmeta etc).