So we now have data in our database. If we would like to grab data from it, we will need the SELECT command. There are several options for grabbing data.

Option 1: Grabbing the entire data table out of the database:

SELECT * FROM `tablename`

Here is the PHP script to illustrate this example. It grabs the entire MySQL data table and displays it in your browser.

<?php

//Step 1 Connect to database

$username = "Your MySQL username here";

$password = "Your MySQL password";

$hostname = "Hostname";

$table = "MySQL Table name where the data will be inserted";

$database = "The name of the MySQL database which holds the table";

$dbhandle = mysql_connect($hostname, $username, $password)

or die("Unable to connect to MySQL");

$selected = mysql_select_db($database,$dbhandle)

or die("Could not select $database");

//Step 2. Insert other PHP scripts here (such as grabbing data from HTML forms, etc)

//Step 3. Sanitize variables before inserting to database. This will prevent MySQL injection.

$categories_id = mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($categories_id));

$language_id = mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($language_id));

$categories_name = mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($categories_name));

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `categories_description`")

or die(mysql_error());

echo '<table border="1">';

echo '<tr>';

echo '<td><b>Categories ID</b></td>';

echo '<td><b>Language ID</b></td>';

echo '<td><b>Categories Name</b></td>';

echo '</tr>';

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){

echo '<tr>';

echo '<td>'.$row['categories_id'].'</td>';

echo '<td>'.$row['language_id'].'</td>';

echo '<td>'.$row['categories_name'].'</td>';

echo '</tr>';

}

echo '</table>';

?>

This will display the table in the HTML browser, which looks like this:

Option 2: Extracting specific data from a specific fieldname in the MySQL table.

There are cases when you need to extract specific data from a specific fieldname that satisfies certain conditions.

An example of this application is when you need to extract the customer email address if they can correctly provide the username and password. So there could be three fields in the table: username, password, and emailaddress.

So, to extract the customer email address in a MySQL table, for example customertable, the PHP query could be:

<?php

//Connect to database...

//Sanitize the variables..

//MySQL query

$result = mysql_query("SELECT `emailaddress` FROM `customertable` WHERE `username`='$username' AND `password`='$password'")

or die(mysql_error());

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result)

or die("Invalid query: " . mysql_error());

$emailaddress = $row['emailaddress'];

echo "Your email address is: $emailaddress";

?>

In this PHP MySQL query, the WHERE statement specifies the condition under which it pulls out an email address matching a certain username AND a password.

You can query MySQL using several AND statements, as long as it is correctly done.