Question

I have an MySQL syntax where I return some data for a user. Is any better way of executing the following query, where I just want to know if there is data for user X in category y.

$search_sql = " SELECT id FROM sn_news WHERE id_category = $category AND id_client = $client ";
$search_query = mysql_query($search_sql);    
$search_query_result = mysql_fetch_assoc($search_query);

if($search_query_result)
{
    $search_result = TRUE;
}
else
{
    $search_result = FALSE;
}

I just what to get a TRUE if there is data for my query, or a FALSE if not, to later use that result in a $.post() to know what to print out and what to remove.

Note: I haven’t tried the code, but I guess it works

Answer 1

mysql_fetch_assoc() returns FALSE when there is no row to fetch. You can check the return value like this:

$search_result = mysql_fetch_assoc($search_query) !== FALSE;

Tell you what, this is essentially the same as what you are doing in your original code.