Question

I’m trying to have mysql return column names that will be parsed by php into an array. Consider this:

$sql = "SELECT user.id AS `user[id]`, user.name AS `user[name]`,
            user_info.address AS `user[info][address]`
            user_info.zip AS `user[info][zip]`
        FROM user JOIN user_info ON user.id = user_info.id";
$stmt = $conn->query($sql);
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

I want $results to look something like this:

array(
    [0] => array(
        [id] => 2,
        [name] => 'john',
        [info] => array(
            [address] => '1234 Main st',
            [zip] => 12345
        )
    )
    [1] => array(
        [id] => 3,
        [name] => 'tom',
        [info] => array(
            [address] => '2811 Second Ave.',
            [zip] => 98765
        )
    )
)

Is there any way to do this without manually looping through the results. I want functionality similar to how php handles square brackets in form submissions (ex. index.php?user[id]=2&user[name]=tom)

Answer 1

No. SQL doesn’t work this way, and neither the MySQL library nor its PHP bindings support this. If you want to have something similar to this then you’ll want a true object-oriented database along with its PHP bindings.