Question

Yesterday another user helped out with building a generic function for handling MySQL Queries. It looks like this:

function fetchAll($query) {
  $res = mysql_query($query) or trigger_error("db: ".mysql_error()." in ".$query);
  $a   = array();
  if ($res) {
    while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) { 
        $a[]=$row;
    }
  }
  return $a;
}

And to output the returned results I simply do the following:

$data = fetchAll("SELECT * FROM news_table ORDER BY id LIMIT 10");

foreach ($data as $row) {
    echo $row['title'];
}

My question relates to outputting the result when there’s only one result in the array. Like when displaying the current blog post of a page. I want to know if I can do it without first calling the foreach loop? Is there a way to output just the first result from the array as I do not need to loop through it.

Perhaps I could have an alternate function, as opposed to the fetchAll() one above? One that just outputs one row?

Cheers,

Scott

Answer 1

Yes. For example:

echo $data[0]['title'];

Basically your $data is a two-dimensional array, with the first dimension being the row number (count starts with 0), so you can access any of the rows directly if you know its number. If you only have one row, it’s necessarily 0.