Select and echo all the table (whatever it is) - php

Question

I have a table I can select and echo the name of the columns (th) and field data (td). But the user can add and delete columns. How I write a more flexible code that could adapt to the user changes? I mean to be able to have the entire table without knowing all the fields.
<?php
$sql = "SELECT * from eee";
$result = mysql_query($sql,$con);
$id = mysql_field_name($result, 0);
$a = mysql_field_name($result, 1);
$b = mysql_field_name($result, 2);
$c = mysql_field_name($result, 3);
?>
<tr>
<th><input class="gris" type="text" name="<?php echo $id ?>" value="<?php echo $id ?>"/></th>
<th><input class="gris" type="text" name="<?php echo $a ?>" value="<?php echo $a ?>"/></th>
<th><input class="gris" type="text" name="<?php echo $b ?>" value="<?php echo $b ?>"/></th>
<th><input class="gris" type="text" name="<?php echo $c ?>" value="<?php echo $c ?>"/></th>
</tr>
<?php
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM eee");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
?>
<tr>
<td> <input class="blanc" type="text" name="num" value="<?php echo $row['id']?>"/> </td>
<td><input class="blanc" type="text" name="a" value="<?php echo $row['a']?>"/></td>
<td><input class="blanc" type="text" name="b" value="<?php echo $row['b']?>"/></td>
<td><input class="blanc" type="text" name="c" value="<?php echo $row['c']?>"/></td>
</tr>
<?php } ?>
</table>

Answer 1

What you are attempting to do is provide for a poor man's ORM. I would suggest to you to read up on INFORMATION_SCHEMA. It is an ANSI standard that can provide you meta information about your databases and tables. You can select column names on the fly from there, and many modern RDMS's support it.
Another option would be to investigate Doctrine as it will provide this functionality for you.

Answer 2

First of all, like people have commented, you should use a new mysql library such as mysqli.
You can use mysql_fetch_assoc($result) to get an associative ( column => value ) array. Then you can loop through it.
$result = mysqli_query($query);
// Make the table headers
$assoc_data = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);
echo "<tr>";
foreach ($assoc_data as $column => $data) {
echo "<th>$column<th>";
}
echo "</tr>";
// Fill in the columns with the data from the DB
do {
foreach($assoc_data as $column => $data) {
echo "<td><input name=\"$column\" value=\"$data\"></td>";
}
} while ($assoc_data = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result));
This way if the DB columns change, or are renamed, or whatever, your table will automatically adjust to those changes.

Answer 3

Let's say $rs is an array of associative arrays comprising the result set, like you can get from most database interfaces. [particularly those that don't use mysql_* functions since they're being deprecated soon]
<?php
if( count($rs) == 0 ) { die('no values returned'); }
foreach( $rs[0] as $key => $value ) {
printf('<th>%s</th>', $key);
}
foreach( $rs as $row ) {
foreach($row as $value) {
printf('<td>%s</td>', $value);
}
}
Or if you simply must keep using creaky old functions...
<?php
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result) or die('no values returned');
foreach( $row as $key => $value ) {
printf('<th>%s</th>', $key);
}
do {
foreach($row as $value) {
printf('<td>%s</td>', $value);
}
} while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
Both of those should print out tables with proper column headers for any size of result set you feed it.