Question

Imagine that you have to query the database in order to retrieve some data (in this example names and ages):

while ($submission = db_fetch_array($submissions)) {
  $data[] = $submission['data'];
}

So the resulting dump of the $data array would be something like:

Array
(
  [0] = "John"
  [1] = "33"
)

If I wanted to form descriptive keys, the resulting code would be:

while ($submission = db_fetch_array($submissions)) {
  $data[] = $submission['data'];
}

$data['name'] = $data[0];
$data['age'] = $data[1];

Now if instead of only two fields in my array I would have 10 or more fields, this seems to me a little bit redundant.

Is there a more logical way to do this?

Note: db_fetch_array it’s a drupal abstraction in order to fetch a query as an array

Answer 1

Don’t now, what db_*() should be, but I recommend to fetch the array as associative array direct from the database

while ($row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
  $data[] = $row;
}

This results in an array of associative arrays, where the keys of the inner associative arrays are the name of the columns.

http://php.net/pdostatement.fetch