Proper PHP MYSQL array usage - php

Question

I have not worked with arrays much in PHP. I have a table of colors. I want to load it into a multidimensional associative array because I am going to be using that table a lot and don't want to do selects over and over again.
I did:
$result = mysql_query("select * FROM color") or die(mysql_error());
$colors = "";
while($colorrec = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$colors[$colorrec['ID']][0] = $colorrec['Description'];
$colors[$colorrec['ID']][1] = $colorrec['HexCode'];
}
then when I want to access a colors information, I can just do something like:
echo "color code WHT";
echo "description ".$colors['WHT'][0];
echo "Hex Code ".$colors['WHT'][1];
Is this the correct way/methodology to do this?

Answer 1

$colors = ""; //what?? this should be array()
This should be something like:
$result = mysql_query("select * FROM color") or die(mysql_error());
$colors = array();
while($colorrec = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$colors[$colorrec['ID']] = array();
$colors[$colorrec['ID']]['Desc'] = $colorrec['Description'];
$colors[$colorrec['ID']]['Hex'] = $colorrec['HexCode'];
}
Then you can do:
echo "color code WHT";
echo "description ".$colors['WHT']['Desc'];
echo "Hex Code ".$colors['WHT']['Hex'];

Answer 2

Sure nothing wrong with going this way. Also if you get lost in your array, just do a quick print_r($array) and it will output the structure for you.

Answer 3

try with:
$result = mysql_query("select * FROM color") or die(mysql_error());
$colors = array();
while($colorrec = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$colors[$colorrec['ID']] = array(
$colorrec['Description'] ,
$colorrec['HexCode'] );
}
echo "color code WHT";
echo "description ".$colors['WHT'][0];
echo "Hex Code ".$colors['WHT'][1];

Answer 4

Neal you can do as he mentioned, if you want more clean go OOP (PHP5)
class Color
{
$description ="";
$hexcode = "";
$someOther="";
}
$colors = array();
$result = mysql_query("select * FROM color") or die(mysql_error());
while($colorrec = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$color = new Color();
$id=$colorrec['HexCode'];
$color->description = $colorrec['Description'];
$color->hexCode = $colorrec['HexCode'];
$colors[$id] = $color;
}
echo $color['ID']->description;
echo $color['ID']->hexCode;

Answer 5

I use it like this:
$numfields = mysql_num_fields($result);
while($red = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
for ($j=0; $j<$numfields; $j++ ) {
$field_name = mysql_field_name($result, $j);
//create Matrix
$datapull[$i][$field_name] = $red[$field_name];
}
$i++;
}
mysql_free_result($result);
var_dump($datapull);
This is more generic and harder to search, it should be used in class method or a function, so you pass the SQL and always expect the same format as a result.