Problem with UPDATE query

[magenta placenta]

Hi all, I'm messing around trying to learn more about db interactions and I have an "edit" page which pulls user info and populates it into text fields for editing/updating the db.

If I make any change to the values and submit, I don't get any errors an my updates show up in the db, so all is good there.

If I just submit without making any changes, my else branch is hit, so mysql_affected_rows is not reporting a row affected, even though aren't I replacing the values in the db with the exact same values? Shouldn't that still report that row being updated?

//if no errors UPDATE DB
if (empty($errors)) {
    $query = "UPDATE users
              SET first_name='$firstname', last_name='$lastname', email='$email', state='$state'";
		
    //if changing password				
    if($newpass1){
        $query .= ", pass=md5('$newpass1')";
    }
						
    $query .= " WHERE user_id = {$_SESSION['user_id']}";
				
    $result = @mysql_query($query, $dbc) OR trigger_error("Query: $query\n<br />MySQL Error: " . mysql_error($dbc));
				
    if (mysql_affected_rows($dbc) == 1) { //if it ran ok
        echo $query . '<br> ok';
    } else { //did not run ok
        echo $query .'<br> noob';
    }
					
}

[magenta placenta]

OK, I updated to this:

 if (mysql_affected_rows($dbc) > -1)

And it seems to work, sound right?