Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns a results set containing information about the columns of a table given for a database specified. The mysql_field_flags(), mysql_field_len(), mysql_field_name(), and mysql_field_type() functions can be used to extract information from the results set. An identifier may be given as a third argument to the function to retrieve information for a different MySQL connection. This function is deprecated, though. Use the mysql_query() function with the SHOW COLUMNS statement instead. Here is an example:

...
$fields = mysql_list_fields('workrequests', 'workreq');
$num_fields = mysql_num_fields($fields);
for ($index = 0; $index < $num_fields; $index++) {
  print mysql_field_name($fields, $index) . "\n";
}
...

After connecting to MySQL, in the first line the example uses mysql_list_fields() to retrieve a list of column names from the database and table given as arguments. To assist the for statement that follows, the mysql_num_fields() function determines the number of fields in the results set, returning a field for each column. Then PHP loops through the for statement for all the fields and displays the name of each column using mysql_field_name(). Here are a few lines from the output of this script:

wrid
wr_date
clientid
...