Question

I’ve spent some time searching on the Internet and playing around with my code but I still can’t figure out why I am getting this error message.
Here is an excerpt from my code:

    } else {
        if (!empty($errors) && nexus_error($nexus)==false) {
            $message = "There were" . count($errors) . " errors in the form.";
        } if (!empty($errors) && nexus_error($nexus)) {
            $message = "There were" . count($errors) . " errors in the form.";
            $message .= "A user with the username" . $nexus . " already exists in the database."; 
        } if (empty($errors) && nexus_error($nexus)) { //***this line causes the error
            $message = "A user with the username" . $nexus . " already exists in the database."; 
        }
    }

The function nexus_error, by the way, is defined below:

function nexus_error($sel_nexus) {
    global $connection;
    $query = "SELECT * FROM person WHERE nexus={$sel_nexus}";
    $result_set = mysql_query($query, $connection);
    confirm_query($result_set);
    if (count(mysql_fetch_array($result_set)) != 0) {
        return true;    // bad
    } else {
        return false;  
    }
}

Any help would be great.
Thanks for your time 🙂

Answer 1

As Samy said the line in question is if (count(mysql_fetch_array($result_set)) != 0) {

The proper way to count the amount of results returned is mysql_num_rows() instead of counting, and your line could simply be this:

if (mysql_num_rows($result_set) != 0) {

Also, your code is currently inefficient in that the nexus_error($nexus) could be called 3 times on the same variable if it filters through to the last if statement (that’s 2 unecessary queries), consider refactoring like so:

$nexusError = nexus_error($nexus);
 } else {
    if (!empty($errors) && $nexusError ==false) {
        $message = "There were" . count($errors) . " errors in the form.";
    } if (!empty($errors) && $nexusError) {
        $message = "There were" . count($errors) . " errors in the form.";
        $message .= "A user with the username" . $nexus . " already exists in the database."; 
    } if (empty($errors) && $nexusError) { //***this line causes the error
        $message = "A user with the username" . $nexus . " already exists in the database."; 
    }
}