Question

I have made a form that asks the user to put in first name and last name and stores it in MySQL database
Now in another file i want to use the database in the table randomly

  <?php
  $con = mysql_connect("localhost","peter","abc123");
  if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }

  mysql_select_db("my_db", $con);

  $result = mysql_query("SELECT `column` FROM `table` ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1");

  //what should i write here if i want get the randomly selected row data in the following variable
  //$firstname = "   ";
  //$lastname = "  ";


  mysql_close($con);
  ?>

basically i want $firstname $lastname to get values randomly from MySQL table and at the same time belong to same row

Answer 1

You’re nearly there – the query is already set up correctly to retrieve 1 random row from the table. You just need to specify which columns to retrieve, and call mysql_fetch_*() on the result to populate your variables:

// ...

// Do the query
$query = "
  SELECT `firstname_col`, `lastname_col`
  FROM `table`
  ORDER BY RAND()
  LIMIT 1
";
$result = mysql_query($query) or trigger_error(mysql_error()." ".$query);

// Fetch the selected row into an associative array
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

// Assign the variables
$firstname = $row['firstname_col'];
$lastname = $row['lastname_col'];

// ...