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Asked: 2026-05-26T05:11:49+00:00

I’m working on a lottery system for my game and i’m having issues with

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I’m working on a lottery system for my game and i’m having issues with the total pot size

current progress: http://playsilab.com/lottery

Anyways, what i’m doing is having it so a user will buy a ticket in the game and that will count as +5 currency to the pot.

This is what the table looks like
enter image description here

basically i need it to count all those 5000000’s and output 1 number
or my other idea, get the amount of people and *5
any of those would be great 🙂

basically for 8 people with 5000000, it should print out 40000000 (40M)

my attempt:

$pot = mysql_query("SELECT name, SUM(pot), COUNT(name) FROM contestants");
$details = mysql_fetch_array($pot);
$totalpot = $details['SUM($details['pot']'];
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This line is wrong:

    $totalpot = $details['SUM($details['pot']'];

    The problem seems to be a combination of:

    • unescaped quotes inside a quoted string
    • your dollar reference is not being evaluated since it is inside single quotes
    • a missing parenthesis
    • and just generally not being correct

    Give your columns aliases so that it is easier to refer to them in your source code:

    SELECT SUM(pot) AS sum_pot, COUNT(name) AS count_name FROM contestants

    Then you can just write:

    $totalpot = $details['sum_pot'];

    Also there are a number of other problems with your code, for example:

    • You are not checking to see if you query failed before trying to access the results.
    • It makes little sense to return both a name from a single row and an aggregated value like a SUM in the same result set. In MySQL it is legal, but in many other databases this would be rejected as an error.
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