Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns the number of fields of the results set given. 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";
}
...

As this example shows, mysql_num_fields() can be useful in conjunction with other functions. Here, a list of fields for a table is retrieved using mysql_list_fields(). In order to help the code display the names of the fields using a for statement, we need to determine the number of fields. The mysql_num_fields() function is handy for figuring out this bit of information.