Question

I write at least a billion PHP while loops a day. Does anybody know of any cool techniques for making the following code dynamic using PHP functions or objects?

$results = mysql_query("SELECT blah FROM blah_blah");       
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($results)) {
//execute statements here
}

Answer 1

As per @Bryan’s comment, you can do something like this as of PHP 5.3+:

function applyStatements($query, $callback) {
    $result = array();
    $mysqlResult = mysql_query($query);
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($mysqlResult)) {
        $result[] = $callback($row);
    }
    return $result;
}

$result = applyStatements('SELECT foo FROM bar', function ($row) {
    return $row['baz'];
});

(Needs additional error handling in case of MySQL failure etc.)