Reading MySQL row, check entry in row and get another entry(confusing title?)

[TedCopple]

Alright,  wasn't quite sure how to summarize this in the title,  but I want to:

 

Check if a user status is "active" or not based on the UserName input.

 

I have a table witch holds:

 

VarChar Username      Var CharPassWord     int Active
Ted                        TedsPW                1

 

something like the above(assuming it formatted correctly.

 

In my php script I will want to input a variable for Username to check for:

 

inputUN in this example would be "Ted".

 

$UserNameToCheck = $_GET['inputUN'];

 

Then I want to check for that UserName in the database,  if it exists,  I want pull the value for the "Active" field for just that UserName and echo it.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

[Psycho]

//Clean input and prevent sql injection attack
$UserNameToCheck = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($_GET['inputUN']));

$query = "SELECT active
          FROM tableName
          WHERE Username = '{$UserNameToCheck}'";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

if(mysql_num_rows($result)==0)
{
    echo "The user {$UserNameToCheck} does not exist.";
}
else
{
    $activeStatus = (mysql_result($result, 0)=='1') ? 'active' : 'not active';
    echo "The user {$UserNameToCheck} is {$activeStatus}";
}

[Maq]

- Query the database:

SELECT Active FROM [table] WHERE Username = '$UserNameToCheck';

- Use mysql_num_rows to check if there are results.

- There are examples of how to do this in the manual link above.

 

[TedCopple]

Alright thanks to the both of you for responses.  Very helpful stuff.

 

Also thanks for the little bit of SQL Injection prevention.  Somebody mentioned something about that to me earlier today,  and I was going to look into it, so thanks.