Question

I tried following this tutorial on PDOs, followed it exactly, yet when trying to connect on a very basic level, it’s outputing a non object error. I made a small test to determining the boolean of the $query variable and it’s coming out as false which is generating the error. Why is it doing this?:

TUTORIAL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb0NYODtGr4&feature=share&list=EC23A4AFEA46A5CB23

ERROR

Fatal error: Call to a member function fetch() on a non-object in
C:\xampp\htdocs\projects\dentaloffice\php\php_connect.php on line 16

CODE

<?php

$config['db'] = array(
    'host'      => 'localhost',
    'username'  => 'root',
    'password'  => '',
    'dbname'    => 'dentaloffice'
);

$db = new PDO('mysql:host=' . $config['db']['host'] . ';dbname =' . $config['db']['dbname'], $config['db']['username'], $config['db']['password']);

$query = $db->query("SELECT appointments.ROOM FROM appointments");

if($query === false){
    echo '$query variable returned false <br>';
}else{
    echo '$query variable returned true <br>';
}

while ($row = $query->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)){
    echo $row['ROOM'];
}

?>

Answer 1

Change this line:

$db = new PDO('mysql:host=' . $config['db']['host'] . ';dbname =' . $config['db']['dbname'], $config['db']['username'], $config['db']['password']);

… into this …

$db = new PDO("mysql:host={$config['db']['host']};dbname={$config['db']['dbname']}",
              $config['db']['username'], $config['db']['password']);

In other words, remove the whitespace symbol right after dbname, and it will work. ) PDO DSN syntax is quite strict, and the string in your example is parsed like no database was specified – hence an error you see.

BTW, it’s a good practice to always check errorInfo() in the way shown in my previous comment in false query/statement/result branches of the PDO code. And now you probably see why. )