Question

The query below is on a page where there is only one value for $submissionid. Thus, the field points has only one value.

How can I turn the points from the query below into a regular PHP variable?

  $sqlStra = "SELECT points, submissionid
               FROM submission 
              WHERE submissionid = '$submissionid'";

EDIT: This is pulling from a MySQL database.

EDIT II: I want to points to equal a variable on the entire page, not just inside of a while loop.

Answer 1

I would use an ORM library (I use the one that comes bundled with Kohana) to eliminate the possibility of SQL injections. However, assuming a database connection is already established, this code will do what you are looking for.

$resource = mysql_query("SELECT points, submissionid FROM submission WHERE submissionid = '$submissionid'");
$result = mysql_fetch_assoc($resource);
echo $result["points"];

If you don’t have a MySQL database connection established, check out mysql_connect.