PHP MySQL "DELETE FROM `table` WHERE `id` = | unknown column `id`

Question

My Code:

if (isset($_POST['del'])) {

  foreach ($_POST['del'] as $id){        
    if ($stmt = $mysqli->prepare("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE `̌id` = ?")) {
    $stmt->bind_param('i', $id);
    $stmt->execute();
    } else {
      printf("Errormessage: %s<br>", $mysqli->error);
    }
  }
}

Result: Errormessage: Unknown column '̌‎id' in 'where clause'

$_POST['del'] contains integers from checkboxes of a form.

However, this is used with the same connection earlier, and it works:

$modified = arrayRecursiveDiff($_POST, $data);

foreach($modified as $key => $val_arr) {
  if (!is_array($val_arr)) {continue;}
  foreach ($val_arr as $iteration => $val) {
    $id = $iteration + 1;

    $query = 'UPDATE users
    SET '. $key .'="'. $val .'"
    WHERE id = '. $id;

    if (preg_match('/.*\sdel\=.*/',$query) === 0){
      $mysqli->query($query);
    }
  }
}

Funniest thing is that I tried to echo that query and copy it directly into mysql command prompt. It worked perfectly...

I would appreciate if someone had an answer to what could possibly be going wrong here,

Answer 1

It seems like there's some weird character ( Edit: consult Footnotes ) that resembles a backtick just before id , but in fact isn't.

I couldn't tell exactly from my editor, yet. ( Edit: consult Footnotes )

Change this line:

if ($stmt = $mysqli->prepare("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE `‎̌id` = ?")) {

to

if ($stmt = $mysqli->prepare("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE `id` = ?")) {

---

EDIT

I just went into EDIT mode again (11:00 pm EDT) after you edited your question with the updated code and I copy/pasted your query line into my editor, and there is still a strange character between your first backtick and the word id .

if ($stmt = $mysqli->prepare("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE `‎̌id` = ?")) {
                                                        ^^

Copy/paste this actual code in your file. But I'm curious to know which file editor you're using that is causing this, or are you typing this by hand?

if (isset($_POST['del'])) {

  foreach ($_POST['del'] as $id){        
    if ($stmt = $mysqli->prepare("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE `id` = ?")) {
    $stmt->bind_param('i', $id);
    $stmt->execute();
    } else {
      printf("Errormessage: %s<br>", $mysqli->error);
    }
  }
}

---

Footnotes:

From what I found in my editor, it seemed to be ( either ) this unicode character ‎ that was before id

Unicode hex: 8206
Unicode decimal: 33286
UTF-8 Hex: e88886
HTML Entity: 舆
Source: http://www.htmlescape.net/82/character_8206.html

---

or this from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark

I quote: "The LRM causes the punctuation to be adjacent to only LTR text – the "C" and the LRM mark – and hence position as if it were in left-to-right text, ie, to the right of the preceding text. ‎ or ‎ may be required by some software rather than the invisible Unicode character itself; the actual invisible character would also make copy editing difficult. "

Added note: The Wikipedia information I found on the subject, I originally found while doing a Google search, which led me to this page which led me to The Wikipedia page I posted just above.

---

Another Unicode character that was in the original question was ̌

From unicodemap.org and I quote: "Unicode Character Map - 0x036F (aka "̌")"

Unicode Hexadecimal: 0x030C
Unicode Decimal: 780
UCS-2 Hexadecimal: 0x0C03
UCS-2 Decimal: 3075
HTML Hexadecimal: ̌
HTML Decimal: ̌

Character (which may be a bit hard to see):

̌