learning how to read data from MYSQL - php

Question

I'm trying to learn php and mysql, I was trying to read data from my database where i was following something online and encounter an error(s) here is my code
<?php
include 'includes/conn.php';
$query =sprintf("Select * from customer");
$result = mysql_query($query);
if (!$result)
{
$message ='from you see this then it's not connecting!'.mysql_error() ."\n";
$message .= 'everything' .$query;
die($message);
}
while ($customer = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
echo $row['cust_id'];
echo $row['fname'];
echo $row['lname'];
echo $row['gender'];
echo $row['dob'];
}
mysql_free_result($result);
?>
//this is where i was trying to make a connection with the database
<?php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = '';
$db ='telmar_php';
$con = mysql_connect($dbhost,$dbuser,$dbpass);
mysql_select_db($db);
?>

Answer 1

Replace
$message ='from you see this then it's not connecting!'.mysql_error() ."\n";
here your string is single quotation marks in it's is causing the problem
with
$message ="from you see this then it's not connecting!".mysql_error() ."\n";

Answer 2

...and to display your results change this:
while ($customer = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
to this:
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))

Answer 3

Please review the below example for reading data my mysql using php.
$sql = "SELECT id, firstname, lastname FROM MyGuests";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);
if (mysqli_num_rows($result) > 0) {
// output data of each row
while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
echo "id: " . $row["id"]. " - Name: " . $row["firstname"]. " " . $row["lastname"]. "<br>";
}
} else {
echo "0 results";
}