Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns a reference to a place in memory containing an array of one row, the next row from the results of a statement handle. There are no arguments for this function. Null values retrieved are returned as undefined. An empty value is returned when there is an error or when there are no more rows remaining in the results set. Therefore, if used in a flow control statement such as while, the empty value returned will end the loop statement. Here is an example:

...
my $sql_stmnt = "SELECT title, author FROM books";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql_stmnt);
$sth->execute();

while (my $book = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref()) {
   my ($title, $author) = @$book;
   print "$title by $author \n";
}

$sth->finish();

Notice that fetchrow_arrayref() is reused at the beginning of each pass through the while statement. This is because a reference to one row is retrieved at a time. The same reference is used for each row retrieved: the array is replaced with each loop. If you want to use array references, you might want to use fetchall_arrayref() instead.