Question

I need to select a whole column.
So my question is how do i get a whole column ?

        $query  = "SELECT * ";
        $query .= "FROM employees ";
        $query .= "WHERE id=*";
        $query .= "ORDER BY id ASC ";

I tried id=* but no luck …
My goal is to cycle through all IDs but some may be missing so i figured i put them in a numeric or associative array and use foreach. If there is a better way , please do share.

EDIT:

function get_all_ids()
    {
        global $connection;
        $query  = "SELECT * ";
        $query .= "FROM employees ";
        $query_result = mysql_query ( $query , $connection );
        confirm_query($query_result);
        $query_result_array = mysql_fetch_assoc($query_result);
        return $query_result_array;
    }

i use this to print the array

  $all_id = get_all_ids();
// preparing the table;
    echo "<pre>";
    print_r($table);
    print_r($all_id);
    echo "</pre>";

and this is the array

  Array
    (
        [id] => 1
        [department_id] => 1
        [name] => jordan
        [EGN] => 9108121544
        [email] => testEmail
        [address] => testAddress
        [country] => testCounty
    )

Answer 1

If there’s more than one row in your result set, you need to keep fetching until all results are retrieved:

$q = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM `table`');
while (($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($q)) != FALSE)
{
// Do something with *one* result
}
mysql_free_result($q);

If you’d like to retrieve all ids in a single fetch, you could do:

$q = mysql_query('SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(`id`) AS `id_list` FROM `table`');
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($q);
mysql_free_result($q);

$list_of_ids = explode(',', $row['id_list']);

WARNING: GROUP_CONCAT() usually has a result limit of 1024 bytes; meaning your results will be truncated for large tables. You could either resort to the first solution, or increase group_concat_max_len for the current connection.