The following information is about accessing your MySQL database using PHP + the PEAR database unit which is already installed on your webserver.

The PEAR database handler is an Object Oriented query retrieval handler.
Anyone who is familiar with object code will find using it a relatively simple way to retrieve MySQL data.

** Standard PHP/MySQL retrieval will be dealt with later

Now we are going to construct a couple of simple MySQL/PHP files that demonstrate data retrieval from a MySQL database.

First you need a database connection file containing the following code...
All of the following files are contained in dbconnect.zip which can be downloaded (further down this page).

We are calling this file dbconnect.php
You need to modify the file contents with your databases name,username,password ( Shown In Red)

<?php

// This is the database connection file

require_once 'DB.php' ;  // require PEAR::DB classes

$db_user = ' yourdatabaseusername' ; // Your database Username

$db_pass = ' mysqlpassword' ; // Your database password

$db_host = 'localhost' ; // Leave as is

$db_name = ' yourdatabasename' ;  // Your database name

$db_engine = 'mysql' ;  // Leave as is

$datasource = $db_engine.'://' .$db_user.':' .$db_pass.'@' .$db_host.'/' .$db_name;

$db = DB::connect($datasource);  // attempt connection

// if connection failed show error

if(DB::isError($db)) { // database error reporting

die($db->getMessage());

}

?>

This is the main PHP file that fetches and prints the data to the page.
We have called this index.php

<?php

// This is the PHP file that collect data from the database

require_once 'dbconnect.php' ; // Import the dbconnect.php file which contains the database information

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM tablename' ; // We are fetching ALL(*) data from the table 'tablename'

$q = $db->query($sql); // Put the sql query into the variable q ($q)

if(DB::IsError($q)) { die($q->getMessage()); }  // Error trapping

$x = 0;   // Set a counter variable

while($result = $q->fetchRow(DB_FETCHMODE_OBJECT)) // While Loop Start
{

$price = $result-> price; // This assumes there is a field in the table ' tablename ' called ' price '

$itemname = $result-> itemname; // This assumes there is a field in the table ' tablename ' called ' itemname '

If ($itemname) // Yes... There is an item, or items in the table ' tablename ' so do this.....

{  // Start If

$x++;   //Increase the value of x by 1

$price = sprintf("%01.2f", $price);  // Format the price for the item in decimal

} // End If

echo "(".$x." )  ".$itemname. "  -  £".$price."<p>"; // Echo (print) the item list & prices to this web page until the While loop ends

} // End While Loop

?>

A quick word about the above echo statement.....
We are using a standard dot notation to concatenate (join) the string we want to print so...
If we assigned 'my' to a variable called $var e.g. ( $var = "my" ) then

echo $var."txt";  Would write the joined up string mytxt to the web page.

MySQL & PHP Downloads

MySQL Manual # MySQL manual in Windows help format (.chm)
PHP Manual  # PHP manual in Windows help format (.chm)
dbconnect.zip   # Contains a standard set of database connection files written in PHP

More Soon!..... :-/