Question

The conventional way of doing this would be

$row = mysql_fetch_array($query);
echo $row['column'];

but I would like to know if it is possible to do something like

echo mysql_fetch_array($query)['column'];

I tried doing this on my local installation, but I get this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[', expecting ',' or ';' in C:\Program Files (x86)\EasyPHP\www\array.php on line 5

This is mainly to reduce the number of lines in my code, as I’m writing a function that places a lot of mysql results into variables, and I don’t want to have code that looks like

$row = ...
$this->data[] = $row[];
$row = ...
$this->data[] = $row[];
...and so on

Answer 1

You can use mysql_fetch_object() instead:

echo mysql_fetch_object($query)->column;

You can also use mysql_result() to retrieve a single field from the resultset:

echo mysql_result($query, 0, 'column');

Both cases are highly inappropriate though if you want to access more than a single column per row..