PHP/MySQL question

Ok so I know you can run queries in a function, I'm working on making my own message board system in PHP/MySQL and it's nearly in usable form, but I want to clean up my code and figured functions would work great.

For example this is what I'm trying right now and it's giving me an error:
Warning: Missing argument 1 for simple() in

function simple($table) {
$sql = “SELECT * FROM “.$table;
$result = mysql_query($sql);
return $result;
}

What am I doing wrong? table i'm trying to pull information from is users and I want to pull the Username filed.

How is the function being called?
Should be something similar to..

$result = simple("users");

Is that how you have it called?

jdf_warrior said:

How is the function being called?
Should be something similar to..

$result = simple("users");

Is that how you have it called?

Click to expand...

If you mean how am I pulling the function? I simply use simple();

Special7 said:

If you mean how am I pulling the function? I simply use simple();

Click to expand...

Well, there's the problem
Your function is written to require an arguement.

So do as jdf_warrior.
Something you can also do is to define a default value for the argument - this way, if you don't supply one, it takes the default value instead.

Special7 said:

function simple($table) {
$sql = “SELECT * FROM “.$table;
$result = mysql_query($sql);
return $result;
}

What am I doing wrong? table i'm trying to pull information from is users and I want to pull the Username filed.

Click to expand...

Well, first of all, if you want just the username, you need to
SELECT username
or whatever the username field is, rather than
SELECT *

Second, ALWAYS clean your input. You may later make use of this function with user-entered options, and forget that you aren't cleaning the input. You would be quite unhappy if your database got wiped because of that

You could make this function more versatile with the following:

You can then call:

1. simple("username");
2. simple("username","userid = 3");
3. simple("content","postid = 25", "posts");
4. simple();

to get:

1. All usernames. Note that with the function as written above, you'll still need to get the usernames out of $result and into an array.
2. Just the username for userid 3.
3. The content field of postid 25 in the posts table.
4. The entire users table. As with #1, this will need further code to move the MySQL result into an array.

If you want to select a different table without a WHERE clause, you'll have to stick a 0 in the call: simple("field",0,"table");