COUNT question

[MarkW78]

Hi everyone. This is probably another dumb question, but I'm still learning so please bear with me for a bit.

I am building a small photo gallery and have things so that users can search through several different fields in each record. But I am having problems counting the number of photos that match the search criteria. I have been successful in incrementing a variable in a WHILE loop, but that doesn't do exactly what I'd like, because it only counts what is displayed then and if I'm limiting the results to 10 per screen, it will normally say 10.

So how do I get it to go through the entire table and count the matching records while still limiting the results to 10 per page? Here is the code that I have, but it isn't working right:

<?
$counter = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM gallery WHERE Picture_Keywords LIKE \"%$find%\" ");
?>

The rest of my code to show the pictures works fine, but when I set $counter to print to the screen, it prints the following:

Resource id #2

I'm curious to know what that means and how to fix this. I'd really appreciate any help you can give. Thanks in advance!

[tubedogg]

The problem is you are forgetting the fundamental thing about queries - they return the results in a result identifier and you need to pull the results you want from there. (That's what the Resource message is about.) Also you need to name the column in the result. Here's a bit to get you going:

$counter = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(*) AS totalresults FROM gallery WHERE Picture_Keywords LIKE \"%$find%\"");
$total = mysql_result($counter,0,0); 

mysql_result returns one cell or field of a result set.

mysql_result (resource result, int row [, mixed field])
The first item is the variable you assigned the query to, the second is the row offset (if any, 0 being the first row) from the top of the result set, and the third can be either the column offset (again 0 being the first column) or the name of the column (or in our case the alias we assigned to it - totalresults).

[7stud]

Hi,

The previous post has some errors. Queries do not return arrays. They return what is called a "result identifier". You need to do some further work to extract the data you queried with other mysql functions. Those functions return arrays or objects depending on which ones you use.

[tubedogg]

He's right about the array part but the rest of the message is valid and should solve your problem.