Re: Newbie Question about Conditionals

That explains it perfectly, thanks you! On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:40 AM, Tommy Pham <tommyhp2@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Matty Sarro <msarro@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hey all! > > This is probably my second post on the list, so please be gentle. Right > now > > I am running through the "Heads First PHP and MySQL" book from O'Reilly. > > It's been quite enjoyable so far, but I have some questions about some of > > the code they're using in one of the chapters. > > > > Basically the code is retreiving rows from a DB, and I'm just not getting > > the explanation of how it works. > > > > Here's the code: > > > > $result=mysqli_query($dbc,$query) > > > > while($row=mysqli_fetch_array($result)){ > > echo $row['first_name'].' '.$row['last_name'].' : > > '. $row['email'] . '<br > > />'; > > } > > > > Now, I know what it does, but I don't understand how the conditional > > statement in the while loop works. Isn't an assignment operation always > > going to result in a "true" condition? Even if > mysqli_fetch_array($result) > > returned empty values (or null) wouldn't the actual assignment to $row > still > > be considered a true statement? I would have sworn that assignment > > operations ALWAYS equated to true if used in conditional operations. > > Please help explain! :) > > > > Thanks so much! > > -Matty > > > > http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-fetch-array.php > > "Returns an array of strings that corresponds to the fetched row, or > FALSE if there are no more rows." > > while($row=mysqli_fetch_array($result)) is equivalent to this: > > $row=mysqli_fetch_array($result); > while ($row){ > > // do something > > $row=mysqli_fetch_array($result); > } > > So, if $row is not equal to FALSE, the loop will happens. >