I have had a look on the main PHP website and am unable to find an explanation on the Resource ID codes that appear when I echo out SQL statements.

Does anyone know where I can find what Resource id message means? (e.g. Resource id #8)

Cheers.

Michael.

__________________
Michael.

REsource is like a file handle, or a pointer to a resource. Tyring to access or print out the resource itself simply returns the resource number.

Say you want to query a database:

$query = "SELECT some,stuff FROM table WHERE criteria='true'";
$result = mysql_result($query);

$result is a resource (a multidimensional array, in fact):

resource = (
1 => array(
some => 'foo',
stuff => 'bar'),
1 => array(
some => 'foo2',
stuff => 'bar2'),
etc....)

But the array is only pointed to by its resource id, and so you can't print it directly.

You'd retrieve values from it via a call such as:

//mysql_fetch_assoc retrieves each subarray, representing a row, as an associative 1-dimensional array
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
  echo "some equals " . $row['some'] . "<br />";
  echo "stuff equals " . $row['stuff'] . "<br />";
}

(prints out:
    some equals foo
    stuff equals bar
    some equals foo2
    stuff equals bar2
and so on)

Does that help?

Dan

Right I see.

The result from my query that i'm trying to get working, is coming from the $result, (from your example).

Michael.

Kind of.

mysql_query() generates both the resource itself and the resource ID which can be used as a shorthand to identify it. Convention, generally, is that we store this number in a variable called something like $result. $result can then be used to fetch all sorts of things about the resource - such as:

mysql_num_rows($result) - "how many rows were returned?"
mysql_num_fields($result) - "how many fields were returned?"
mysql_field_name($result,$i) - "what's the name of the ith column returned?"

...and so on.

Similarly, the resource identifier representing your actual database connection (let's assume he's called $connection) can be used to find out similar esoteria, regarding your database connection. For example:

mysql_thread_id($connection) - "what's the ID value of the currently running thread (a kind of 'whomami' for database execution threads)?"

...and:

mysql_client_encoding($connection) - "what characterset is currently being used?"

HTH
Take it easy,
dan