List columns contents from sql table - php

Question

I want to list the contents of a 'name' column from an sql table on a HTML/PHP web page. This page currently allows me to create records, but is there a way of listing the records by name only, and displaying them somewhere specific on the HTML page?

Answer 1

The comments didn't seem to answer 100% to my knowledge so maybe this broad answer might help.
If you want to grab all the names located in a specific SQL table first make sure to connect to your database using
mysql_connect('SERVER', 'USER', 'PASSWORD');
mysql_select_db('DATABASENAME');
After you have connected you ran run queries to your database as stated. For your example it would be something like this:
//Query to get values
$query= mysql_query("SELECT name FROM TABLE_NAME");
//Places all query results into an array "row"
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)){
//Prints values as though it were HTML
echo $row['name']."<br>";
}
Here's an example of getting one name back from the users table and storing it in a variable to use later in the page.
<?php
$query = mysql_query("SELECT name FROM Users");
$result = mysql_fetch_array($query);
$name = $result['name'];
?>
<div class="greeting">Hello <?php echo $name; ?></div>
In a more advanced case you can also store variables in sessions (cookies) so that you can use them throughout your website (including subdomains) without having to re-query the database each time
<?php
session_start();
$query = mysql_query("SELECT name FROM Users");
$result = mysql_fetch_array($query);
$_SESSION['name'] = $result['name'];
?>
Now whenever you want to grab the variable you just got from the query simple do <?php $_SESSION['name']; ?> Just make sure that you have session_start() at the top of the page (my suggestion is place in a header file and include the header file in all pages)
Make sure your file is a .php file and you place the code about in the proper <?php ?> tags