The standard steps have to be taken:

• Connect to MySQL — on a real site, you would want to arrange a persistent connection to avoid the overhead of reconnecting for each query

• Invoke a particular database — here, people

• Construct a database query:

  select xname,sname from people where xname='$xname'

• Invoke the query and store the result in a variable — $result

• Dissect $result to reveal the various records that have satisfied the query

• Print the returned data, line by line

• Free $result to make its memory available for reuse

And we see on the screen:

Lookup: You want people called jane
We have: 
Jane, Smith
Jane, Jones

The content of the variable $query is exactly what you would type into MySQL. A point worth remembering is that while the query:

select * from name where xname='$xname'

would work if you were using MySQL on its own, you have to specify the variable fields so that PHP can pick them up:

select xname, sname from name where xname='$xname'

But this can be fixed by using a more sophisticated extraction of data:

...
$query = "select * from people where xname='$xname'";
$result = mysql_query($query);

/* print */
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_NUM))
	printf("<BR>%s %s",$row[0],$row[1]);

mysql_free_result($result);
...

When we came to run all this, our only difficulty was in getting the script to connect to the database. This was the original code, from the PHP manual:

mysql_connect("localhost","myusername","mypass");

In keeping with the setup on our test machine from the first three chapters of the book, we used:

mysql_connect("localhost","webserv","");

This produced an unpleasant message:

Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through
socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (38) in /usr/www/APACHE3/site.php/htdocs/test.php on 
line 7

This was probably caused by our odd setup where DNS was not available to resolve the URL. According to the PHP documentation, there were a number of ways of curing this:

• Inserting the default port number:

  mysql_connect("localhost:3306","webserv","");

• Editing /usr/local/lib/php.ini. to include the line:

  mysql.default_port = 3306

• Inserting this in the Config file:

  SetEnv MYSQL_TCP_PORT 3306

None of them worked, but happily, it was enough to change the line of PHP code to this:

mysql_connect("127.0.0.1","webserv","");