Help!!!

[sweenster]

Any ideas what i'm doing wrong...
I fire this at the mySQL database (from a php script):

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username=sweenster

and i get no response.

i've tried:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username like 'sweenster'

as well and it still aint workin.

[kestrel7]

The sql looks correct to me. The only prob I can see with the first query is that perhaps it should be:

SELECT * FROM users where username='sweenster';

but then again, the latter query:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username LIKE 'sweenster';

is (as far as I can tell) 100% correct. So perhaps it is a problem with the table or column name. What error does it complain about?

[sweenster]

well my web host has a built in sql-maintainance program which i also tried using.

I put the first request in and got the response:
"unknown column 'sweenster'"

mind you, the query itself is defined as:

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username=".$user."";

where $user is referred from the login page
maybe this helps??

[kestrel7]

The reason you get the "unknown column 'sweenster'" error is because it is not in single quotes so mysql tries to treat it like a column name but since there is no column name, sweenster in table users it complains.

This should fix your problem:

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username=\"$user\"";

EXPLANATION:
You have to escape, the quotation marks, otherwise php will treat it as the end of a string which it recognises as a set of charachters enclosed in quotes.

The dot operator acts as a string concatanator and joins two or more strings together.

Fixing these two aspects (as in the code above) should correct the problem.