Describing a Table
When you aren’t logged into the MySQL command line, here’s a handy piece of code that you can use to verify that a table has been correctly created from inside a browser. It simply issues the query DESCRIBE cats and then outputs an HTML table with four headings: Column, Type, Null, and Key, underneath which all columns within the table are shown.
<?php <?php require_once 'login.php'; $db_server = mysql_connect($db_hostname, $db_username, $db_password); if (!$db_server) die("Unable to connect to MySQL: " . mysql_error()); mysql_select_db($db_database) or die("Unable to select database: " . mysql_error()); $query = "DESCRIBE cats"; $result = mysql_query($query); if (!$result) die ("Database access failed: " . mysql_error()); $rows = mysql_num_rows($result); echo "<table><tr> <th>Column</th> <th>Type</th> <th>Null</th> <th>Key</th> </tr>"; for ($j = 0 ; $j < $rows ; ++$j) { $row = mysql_fetch_row($result); echo "<tr>"; for ($k = 0 ; $k < 4 ; ++$k) echo "<td>$row[$k]</td>"; echo "</tr>"; } echo "</table>"; ?>