PHP help ereusted (1 Viewer)

PHP help requested

I'm finally learning to code in PHP, to make my work managing a bird club website easier. I plan to store and handle bird names as five-letter BTO codes.

I'm looking for some PHP code which will return the common and/ or scientific name of a bird, if given the code (e.g. "Black Redstart" or "Phoenicurus ochruros" for "BLARE") - presumably, by doing a database lookup, so I also need the database!

Can anyone help, please?

pigsonthewing said:

I'm finally learning to code in PHP, to make my work managing a bird club website easier. I plan to store and handle bird names as five-letter BTO codes.

I'm looking for some PHP code which will return the common and/ or scientific name of a bird, if given the code (e.g. "Black Redstart" or "Phoenicurus ochruros" for "BLARE") - presumably, by doing a database lookup, so I also need the database!

Can anyone help, please?

Click to expand...

You will probably want to use MySQL for your db. Most likely if your host has PHP, they will have MySQL. Here is the function I use for my connection to my database:

<?php
function db_connect()
{
$link=@mysql_pconnect("localhost", "USERNAME", "PASSWORD");
if ($link && mysql_select_db("DBNAME"))
return ($link);
return(FALSE);
}
?>

Create a user in the database either through a SQL query (was it GRANT or something like that?) or through a web GUI like phpMyAdmin and give the user appropriate rights. I would create two users - a read user and a write user.

Then you might call the function like so:

<?php

db_connect() or exit("There was a problem connecting to the database.");
$result=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM birdlist WHERE codename = 'blare'");
while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo "<P>";
echo $row["commonname"];
echo "<BR>";
echo $row["latinname"];
echo "<BR>";
echo $row["codename"];
echo "</P>";

}
?>

Double check my sql syntax, it's been a while.

I would create the table as three columns (commonname, latinname, codename). If you don't want to create them manually via GUI (e.g., phpMyAdmin), you can import the db from a text file, but that can get tricky depending on where you're getting the info from. You could also write a million insert statements, but that would be laborious.

I hope that helps you get started!