Parsing Commands

No more commands that return pointers are introduced in this chapter. The remainder of these functions do not access any SQL database at all, but rather rely on data already garnered from the database. These commands are devoted to processing the result of a MySQL_query command.

Now we cover fetch commands, so called because they fetch rows of the result, one at a time. These commands move through the result, which we pointed to, and retrieve the atoms of data that we have blasted our data into an easily predictable formula. The result object keeps track of the current row within the results data. By keeping a pointer to the next row to be fetched within the object, PHP assures us that every time we call the fetch commands, we get new data.