Theo\’s Blog

Last night I ran into the crazy problem that a mysql result set contained rows (confirmed with mysql_num_rows) but I wasn’t able to fetch the rows in mysql_fetch_array while loop construction. I managed to create a workaround but I posted a note on the php.net mysql_fetch_array page asking for an explanation. The note got rejected so I figured I could use my own blog in the search for an answer.

Here is the note;

I hope someone can help me with this question.

I have 2 code snippets. The first works, the second doesn’t. I would prefer using the second code snippet because it seems cleaner. What’s wrong with the second code snippet?

This works;

$results = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT(col) FROM table WHERE col!='' ORDER BY RAND()");
for( $i = 0; $i < mysql_num_rows( $results ); $i++ )
{
// do something with mysql_result($results,$i,0);
}

This doesn’t work;

$results = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT(col) FROM table WHERE col!='' ORDER BY RAND()");

 while($result = mysql_fetch_array($results))
 {
 //do something with $result
 }