Storing and accessing CONSTANTS in a database

[maexus]

This used to work before but when I rewrote it, it doesn't..

My userlevels are stored as constants

[code]
//User Levels
define('ADMIN',        4);
define('MOD',        3);
define('USER',        2);
define('GUEST',        1);
define('BANNED',    0);
[/code]

My registration script stores these userlevel titles as a string to access later on during login and page security. Before I could say..

[code]
$results = mysql_query('some query');
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results);

echo $row['userlevel'];
[/code]

That should output like USER which is a constant so it really outputs 2 into the script. That's what it used to do but now it outputs USER, which is no good. I have to end up using

[code]
$user['level'] = constant($row['userlevel']);
[/code]

Now this works but it's annoying because I never had to do this before... My question is, what is the best way to store a constant name in a DB then spit the value back out, not as a string, but as something the PHP parsing will automaticly parse as a constant?

Sorry if this is confusing.

[Guest footballkid4]

If you really wanted to, you could store:
define( "MOD" , 3 );
In the DB, and then run eval() when you pull things from the DB...but that's not the best way to do it.

You can store the information like this: MOD|3

Then your script would look similar to:
[code]<?php
$query = "queryhere";
$result = mysql_fetch_array( $query ) or die( mysql_error() );
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array( $result ) )
{
  $levels = explode( "|" , $row['userlevel'] );
  define( $levels[0] , $levels[1] );
}
?>[/code]