select "field name' AS question

[phppup]

Can anybody clarify the usefulness of "AS" and elaborate on how it operates.

 

If I select a 'bananas' AS 'yeelow fruit' will it change the TITLE in the table?  Or the table that is being viewed?

If I dump a list of 'FRUITS' into and HTML table, will using AS rename each column for me, or is that handled by MY coing of the HTML table?

[Kays]

ALIAS.

 

It's useful if you use JOIN on tables that may have same column names. So you can alias the RESULT columns to have different names so that they don't clash. It won't modify your tables.

[Pikachu2000]

If you SELECT a field from a table and use any MySQL functions while doing so, using an alias makes it easier to reference the field in an associative array when outputting the results.

 

if you were to do this:

$query = "SELECT DATE_FORMAT(date_field, '%M-%D-%Y') FROM table";
$result = mysql_query($query);

 

You would need to access that field in an associative array like this:

$array = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
echo $array['DATE_FORMAT(date_field, '%M-%D-%Y')'];

 

With an alias, it becomes more straightforward:

$query = "SELECT DATE_FORMAT(date_field, '%M-%D-%Y') AS mydate FROM table";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$array = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
echo $array['mydate'];