checking if url exists in database.

[xwishmasterx]

Hello

 

I have a directory script where users can submit websites.

I need it to check for the input of the urls to avoid duplicates.

 

How can I do this?

[Jax2]

Pretty easy actually... just do an sql statement:

$userinputULR=$_REQUEST['url'];

"Select * from table where url=$userinputURL"

and check to see if any rows are returned using num_rows, and if num_rows result isn't 0, it already exists in your database.

 

[the182guy]

Best practice for this is to use a SELECT COUNT() query like:

 

SELECT COUNT(id) AS num FROM websites WHERE url = '$url'

 

There will be one row returned with just one field called 'num'.

 

Using a normal SELECT or SELECT * is inefficient because you are asking the MySQL server to pull out a dataset which you don't even need, you only want to know how many rows there are.

[Jax2]

Quite true, wasn't thinking straight LOL! Thanks