Question

I’m new to MySQL with PHP, i have already created a database and a script to populate the database, What i have is a form that inserts an id and an email.

Now what i need to do is create a script that searches for the ID and then once it finds the exact ID i can get the email that was also associated with that ID and do something with it.

What is the correct way to search the database based on one field and then extract the other field?

Answer 1

Warning:

Please, don’t use mysql_* functions to write new code. They are no longer maintained and the community has begun the deprecation process. See the red box?

Instead, you should learn about prepared statements and use either PDO or MySQLi. This article should give some details about deciding which API to use. For PDO, here is a good tutorial.

This is relatively easy. After your connection has been set up (assuming $connection as the pointer), you just need to execute the following query:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT email FROM users_table WHERE user_id = 1", $connection);
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

Your requested e-mail value will be accessible as $row['email'].

However, once you have satisfied a level of knowledge in using MySQL with PHP, heed the warning and switch to mysqli or PDO.