Select Data From a Database Table

The SELECT statement is used to select data from a database.

Syntax

SELECT column_name(s)
FROM table_name

To learn more about SQL, please visit our SQL tutorial.

To get PHP to execute the statement above we must use the mysqli_query() function. This function is used to send a query or command to a MySQL connection.

Example

The following example selects all the data stored in the "Persons" table (The * character selects all the data in the table):

<?php
$con=mysqli_connect("example.com","peter","abc123","my_db");
// Check connection
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
  echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
}

$result = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT * FROM Persons");

while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) {
  echo $row['FirstName'] . " " . $row['LastName'];
  echo "<br>";
}

mysqli_close($con);
?>

The example above stores the data returned by the mysqli_query() function in the $result variable.

Next, we use the mysqli_fetch_array() function to return the first row from the recordset as an array. Each call to mysqli_fetch_array() returns the next row in the recordset. The while loop loops through all the records in the recordset. To print the value of each row, we use the PHP $row variable ($row['FirstName'] and $row['LastName']).

The output of the code above will be:

Peter Griffin
Glenn Quagmire