Question

Is it valid to do something like this, I never see more than 1 or operator:

$insert = 'INSERT into fhours (' .$cols . ') VALUES ('.$query.')';
$update = sprintf("UPDATE fhours SET %s WHERE fname='$fname' AND lname='$lname'", $field_list);

$result = $db->query($update) or $db->query($insert) or die('uhoh');`

Answer 1

There are two problems with this.

The first is that you can be using parameterized queries. Look at PDO, this will help you greatly. Not only is this faster for multiple inserts, but you don’t have to worry about SQL injection so much.

The second is that you can use MySQL’s ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE to take care of this issue for you. Otherwise, when your query fails, you don’t know why it failed. It may not have been a duplicate key issue at all!

Other than that, the code from the standpoint of or is just fine.