Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns a statement handle for fetching information about columns in a table. Here is an example:

...
my $sth = $dbh->column_info(undef, 'bookstore', 'books', '%');
my $col_info = $sth->fetchall_arrayref();

foreach my $info(@$col_info) {
   foreach (@$info) {
      if($_) { print $_ . "|"; }
   }
   print "\n";
}

This program excerpt will produce a list of columns in the books table of the bookstore database. Here are a couple of lines of the program results:

bookstore|books|book_id|4|INT|11|10|4|1|NO|1|int(11)|
bookstore|books|title|12|VARCHAR|50|1|12|2|YES|varchar(50)|
...

The values of the fields in order are: TABLE_CAT (usually empty), TABLE_SCHEM, TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE, TYPE_NAME, COLUMN_SIZE, BUFFER_LENGTH, DECIMAL_DIGITS, NUM_PREC_RADIX, NULLABLE, REMARKS, COLUMN_DEF, SQL_DATA_TYPE, SQL_DATETIME_SUB, CHAR_OCTET_LENGTH, ORDINAL_POSITION, and IS_NULLABLE.