MySQL Unknown column in where clause for simple select statement - php

Question

I have a very basic select statement that is causing a column unknown error. The problem with the query happens when I try to use a character instead of just numbers in the variable. Wondering if it has anything to do with Collation.
Here's what I have so far:
$titleno=$_REQUEST['title_no'];
$titleno=mysql_real_escape_string($titleno);
$titleno = utf8_decode($titleno); //tried without this before but didn't work
$query="SELECT * FROM `Titles` WHERE `title-no` = '".$titleno."'";
//tried various versions of this query - left it as single quotes as that seems to be the correct way. This only fails when a character is entered. Numbers work fine.
echo "query - <br> $query <br>";
$get_title_result=mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
//here I get the unknown column name error - MySQL treats the titleno as the column name
Echo output:
SELECT * FROM `Titles` WHERE `title-no` = '1234566d'
Unknown column '1234566d' in 'where clause'
If I didn't use the 'd' in title-no, it works fine....Also, I tried a different column name that doesn't have the hyphen and still get the same behavior. The DB defines collation for title-no as latin1_swedish_ci. (This problem doesn't occur when I paste the query into mysqladmin)
Here's the table definition:
CREATE TABLE `Titles` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`title-no` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
UNIQUE KEY `title-no` (`title-no`),
KEY `id` (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM
AUTO_INCREMENT=9090949 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=9090949 ;
RESOLVED: The issue was not with this query. It was with a subsequent query. I was confused because I was only echoing this query. My bad. Thank you all for your support! :)

Answer 1

Try with:
$query = "SELECT * FROM Titles WHERE `Titles`.`title-no` = '" . $titleno . "'";

Answer 2

Here is a quick conversion to statement-based query (which is using MySQLi, adapt as necessary, your code or this example). The assumption is that the underlying prepared statement engine knows that you cannot specify a column name with placeholders in a prepared statement, so it should be passing it correctly (here's hoping :-)
$titleno=$_REQUEST['title_no'];
$statement=mysqli_prepare($your_mysqli_link, "SELECT `id` FROM `Titles` WHERE `title-no` = ?");
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($statement, 's', $titleno);
mysqli_stmt_execute($statement);
mysqli_stmt_bind_result($statement, $found_id);
mysqli_stmt_fetch($statement);
echo "found id: $found_id";