Question

I’m just wondering what kind of SQL command I could execute that would select all items from a certain table where column A is not equal to x and column B is not equal to x

Something like:

select something from table
where columna does not equal x and columnb does not equal x

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The key is the sql query, which you will set up as a string:

$sqlquery = "SELECT field1, field2 FROM table WHERE NOT columnA = 'x' AND NOT columbB = 'y'";

Note that there are a lot of ways to specify NOT. Another one that works just as well is:

$sqlquery = "SELECT field1, field2 FROM table WHERE columnA != 'x' AND columbB != 'y'";

Here is a full example of how to use it:

$link = mysql_connect($dbHost,$dbUser,$dbPass) or die("Unable to connect to database");
mysql_select_db("$dbName") or die("Unable to select database $dbName");
$sqlquery = "SELECT field1, field2 FROM table WHERE NOT columnA = 'x' AND NOT columbB = 'y'";
$result=mysql_query($sqlquery);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result) {
//do stuff
}

You can do whatever you would like within the above while loop. Access each field of the table as an element of the $row array which means that $row['field1'] will give you the value for field1 on the current row, and $row['field2'] will give you the value for field2.

Note that if the column(s) could have NULL values, those will not be found using either of the above syntaxes. You will need to add clauses to include NULL values:

$sqlquery = "SELECT field1, field2 FROM table WHERE (NOT columnA = 'x' OR columnA IS NULL) AND (NOT columbB = 'y' OR columnB IS NULL)";