Num_rows problem

[mike12255]

Hey guys I cant seem to find this error guess ive been looking at this screen to long to try and get this project done in time would appriciate if someone could take a fresh look at it and tell me where I went wrong. Basically im trying to get the number of entries returned by my query. I echoed out the query and manually entered it into phpmyadmin there is a 1 row result however whenever i kill $num_result it doesnt give me any  output.

<?php

public function getNewMessages()
{
	global $db,$db_table_prefix;

	$sql = "SELECT
			*
			FROM
			messages
			WHERE
			`to_id` = '".$db->sql_escape($this->user_id)."' AND `read` = 0";




	$res = mysql_query($sql) or die (mysql_error());

	$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($res);

	die ($num_rows); // does not return a value



	return $num_rows;

}


?>

[btherl]

From the manual page of exit(), for which die() is an alias:

 

If status is an integer, that value will be used as the exit status and not printed. Exit statuses should be in the range 0 to 254, the exit status 255 is reserved by PHP and shall not be used. The status 0 is used to terminate the program successfully.

 

In other words, use something other than die() to print out the number of rows.