Question

I’m trying to learn to use PDO instead of MySQLi for database access and I’m having trouble selecting data from the database. I want to use:

$STH = $DBH->query('SELECT * FROM ratings WHERE title=$title ORDER BY date ASC');
$STH->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

while($row = $STH->fetch()) {
    echo $row['title']; 
}

but I’m getting this error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function setFetchMode() on a
non-object in
/home/owencont/public_html/owenstest.com/ratemystudents/index.php
on line 6

If I take out the WHERE statement it works fine. How can I select a row based on if it’s value matches a variable?

Thanks,

Owen

Answer 1

It’s likely a SQL syntax error, because you forgot to quote $title. It ended up as bareword in the query (also not even interpolated as string), resulting in an error. And your PDO connection was not configured to report errors. Use ->quote() on arguments before the ->query():

$title = $DBH->quote($title);
$STH = $DBH->query("SELECT * FROM ratings WHERE title=$title ");

Or better yet, use parameterized SQL:

$STH = $DBH->prepare("SELECT * FROM ratings WHERE title=? ");
$STH->execute(array($title));