Mysql “UPDATE” isn't doing anything

Question

This is my code for the update:

$key = $skills[$ind];
echo "\t\t<td>" . $key . "</td>\n";

//explode using a comma as a delimiter
$data_n = explode(",", $word);
$score[$key][”Rank”] = $data_n[0];
$score[$key][”Level”] = $data_n[1];
$score[$key][”Exp”] = $data_n[2];

echo "\t\t<td>" .$data_n[0] . "</td>\n";
echo "\t\t<td>" .$data_n[1] . "</td>\n";
echo "\t\t<td>" .$data_n[2] . "</td>\n";

$result = mysql_query("UPDATE accounts SET $key ='$data_n[1]' WHERE username = '$user'") 
          or 
          die(mysql_error());

Basically, there's a string "key" that is the name of the thing I'm trying to update, but it's just not updating. I've changed "mysql_query" to "print" and it prints out exactly what it's supposed to:

UPDATE accounts SET Total ='1144' WHERE username = 'derekboy'

There aren't any errors. printing out $result shows that it's "True" that it sent the message to MySQL. Can anyone see the problem, because I've been looking for a whole day and still nothing.

All of my code is located here ; thanks. You can see that I connect to a database at the very top of the script.

Answer 1

1) You does not seem to have connected to mysql. Does your code do mysql_connect and mysql_select_db prior to this ?

2) Try running the query in the PHPMyAdmin (or whatever MySQL client you use) to see if there's any error or not. Does the query runs fine there ?

3) Most probably, there is no username with value derekboy in your table.

Answer 2

I don't know PHP particularly well, but it seems that you are surrounding the variables with single quotes, in which variables aren't interpolated.

Try something like:

$result = mysql_query("UPDATE accounts SET " . $key . " ='" . $data_n[1] . "' WHERE username = '". $user" . "'") or die(mysql_error());