Question

This is a bit of a difficult problem for me to word, and I may be going about it in the completely wrong way.

I’m storing a set of options in a database, where each option is its own column. The user can change the number of options, however, so I need a way of allowing PHP to always select all the options.

Let’s say I have these columns: options_dialog_1, options_dialog_2, options_dialog_3, options_dialog_4

There could be a varying number of these dialog option columns, eg, another called options_dialog_5 could be added.

How do I select all the dialog option columns, based on their column name format?

Answer 1

I think you have a database design problem here; repeating columns like that always leads to trouble in the end. I think you need two tables, one for the user and one for the options defined something like this…

USERS
   id
   name

OPTIONS
    id
    user_id
    option_dialogue_number
    option_dialogue_value

That turns the columns into rows, which are rather easier to get at.