Question

I have been trying to get the complete meta information for the fields in a result set from Postgresql in php (something like mysql_fetch_field(), which gives a lots of info about the field definition). While I am able to use the following functions to find some information:

$name = pg_field_name($result, 1);
$table = pg_field_table($result, 1);
$type = pg_field_type($result, 1);

I could not find a way to get more details about whether the field allow null values, contains blob data (by field definition), is a primary,unique key by definition etc. The mysql_fetch_field() gives all of this information somehow, which is very useful.

I would really like some way to get that information from php directly, but if that is not possible, then maybe someone has created a routine that might be able to extract that info from a pgsql resultset somehow.

PS: This looks promising, but the warning on the page is not a good sign:
http://php.net/manual/en/pdostatement.getcolumnmeta.php

Also, I am not using PDO at the moment, but if there is no solution, then a PDo specific answer will suffice too.

Answer 1

You can find the metadata on you column with a query like this:

select * from information_schema.columns 
where table_name = 'regions' and column_name = 'capital'

This should provide all of the information found in mysql_fetch_field. I’m not a php coder, so perhaps someone knows of a function that wraps this query.