Question

This is really weird.

This query obviously works:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM restaurant_page WHERE title LIKE '%$search_title%'");

But, this doesn’t:

$category = 'restaurant_page';

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM '$category' WHERE title LIKE '%$search_title%'");

With the second query, I get the resource boolean error.

$category is table the user wants to search from. When I print out the query with the variable, it’s the exact same as the first one. Why wouldn’t this work?

Answer 1

Don’t use single quotes around your table name, use backticks (`) instead:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `$category` WHERE title LIKE '%$search_title%'");

NB. Please make sure that $category and $search_title are not plain user provided variables