Question

I’m trying to do a simple operation on a MySQL database: my contacts have their complete names on a column called first_name while the column last_name is empty.

So I want to take what’s on the first_name column and split it on the first occurrence of a white space and put the first part on the first_name column and the second part on the last_name column.

I use the following code but it’s not working:

$connection = new mysqli(DATABASE_SERVER, DATABASE_USERNAME, DATABASE_PASSWORD, DATABASE_NAME, DATABASE_PORT);

$statement = $connection->prepare("SELECT id, first_name FROM contacts");

$statement->execute();

$statement->bind_result($row->id, $row->firstName);

while ($statement->fetch()) {
  $names = separateNames($row->firstName);

  $connection->query('UPDATE contacts SET first_name="'.$names[0].'", last_name="'.$names[1].'" WHERE id='.$row->id);
}

$statement->free_result();
$statement->close();

$connection->close();

Can I use the $connection->query while having the statement open?

Best regards.

UPDATE

The $connection->query(...) returns FALSE and I get the following error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'MySQL Error - 2014 : Commands out of sync; you can't run this command now'

I changed the code to the following and worked:

$connection = new mysqli(DATABASE_SERVER, DATABASE_USERNAME, DATABASE_PASSWORD, DATABASE_NAME, DATABASE_PORT);

$result = $connection->query("SELECT id, first_name FROM contacts");

while ($row = $result->fetch_row()) {
  $names = separateNames($row[1]);

  $connection->query('UPDATE contacts SET first_name="'.$names[0].'", last_name="'.$names[1].'" WHERE id='.$row[0]);
}

$connection->close();

Answer 1

I can only have one active statement at a given time, so I had to make one of the queries via the $connection->query() method.

As @hakre mentioned:

I still keep my suggestion that you should (must!) do prepared statements instead of query() to properly encode the update values

I opted to use the statement method for the update query, so the final working code is the following:

$connection = new mysqli(DATABASE_SERVER, DATABASE_USERNAME, DATABASE_PASSWORD, DATABASE_NAME, DATABASE_PORT);

$result = $connection->query("SELECT id, first_name FROM contacts");

$statement = $connection->prepare("UPDATE contacts SET first_name=?, last_name=? WHERE id=?");

while ($row = $result->fetch_row()) {
  $names = separateNames($row[1]);

  $statement->bind_param('ssi', $names[0], $names[1], $row[0]);
  throwExceptionOnMySQLStatementError($statement, "Could not bind parameters", $logger);

  $statement->execute();
  throwExceptionOnMySQLStatementError($statement, "Could not execute", $logger);
}

$statement->free_result();
$statement->close();

$connection->close();

Thanks to all that gave their inputs, specially to @hakre that helped me to reach this final solution.