query for or change column name in php? - php

Question

I need to figure out a way to prepare an insert statement in PHP for a SQL db and I'm having trouble comprehending the logic. The insert statement will be from data I'm receiving in JSON. The JSON contains questions and answers. The table I'm inserting them into is the problem. On the front end (website) the table has column names that represent the questions and it look like this.
Date | Address | City | Zip
Now the problem is in the database these names don't carry over. The column names are just column1 column 2 etc. So it looks like this
Column1 | Column2 | Column3 | Column4
Another thing - when each table like this is created it will have different values so I can't hard code the relationship. Also these tables are created from importing an excel spreadsheet from the front end (website). So I came up with a plan to duplicate row 1 & 2 of the spreadsheet so that now when you import them the database looks like this
id | Column1 | Column2 | Column3 | Column4
1 | Date | Address | City | Zip
So now I have some reference to the values that will need to be inserted. Now the next steps involved will be.
Query for column name based on the data in row 1 OR change the column name to the data in row 1.
Insert data into the correct columns based on the query
So in summary I cannot insert the answers into the correct column representing the question without the proper information. I personally think changing the column names in PHP would be the better option. However I'm pretty new to PHP and SQL so I don't even know if this is possible. Any help is appreciated
EDIT
to give a slightly better understanding of the problem I am posting the PHP I currently have.
$json = safe($_POST['assessment']);
/*
$json =
'{
"info":
[
"Date: 6-22-13",
"Phone #: [phone]",
"Address: 304 N. SCOTTSDALE RD.",
"City: SCOTTSDALE",
"Zip: 85251",
"State: AZ"
]
}';
*/
$data = json_decode($json,true);
$collection = array();
foreach($data['info'] as $piece) {
$info = explode(':', $piece);
$collection[] = array('question' => $info[0], 'answer' => $info[1]);
}
echo '<pre>'; print_r($collection); echo '</pre>'

Answer 1

The following should create an associative array that maps the names of columns to the column numbers in the database schema:
$stmt = $db->prepare('select Column1, Column2, Column3, ... from table where id = 1');
$result = $stmt->execute();
$data = $result->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
$col_map = array_flip($data);
You can then use this when preparing future queries of the database.
If you don't know how many columns you could have, you could do this:
$stmt = $db->prepare('select * from table where id = 1');
$result = $stmt->execute();
$data = $result->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
unset($data['id']); // Remove the `id` column, which doesn't conform to the ColumnN pattern
$col_map = array_flip($data);