Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns the number of columns in a results set. You can also use it to test whether there was an error in a SELECT query. A SELECT query will return at least one blank field when there is an error, resulting in a value of 0 for the function. Here is an example:

...
if(!result)
   {
    if(mysql_field_count(mysql) == 0)
       {
        printf("Error \n");
        return 1;
       }
   }
...

See the entry for the mysql_fetch_row() function earlier in this section for another example involving this function.