Alright, got it working, thanks

Could you do me a favour, I know this will probably make you think "i can't be arsed" but could you explain to me, what exactly it is you are doing to the line of code that gives the out put?

Sort of, outline the transition between my crappy version, and your better version.

EDIT: Screw the above question. I looked at it, and I think I understand it.

The question I'd like to know, is what command do I put inplace of



To display the LAST entry, not the first. The problem is last is dynamic, it will be changing many times. Is there a predetermind term for "last"? Because if so, displaying the last 3 would be easy I guess. Just "last - 1" and so on.

you talking about the last record returned?

couple ways I can think to do it. First way (what you'll probably use. )

$number_of_records = mysql_num_rows($result);

this gives you the number of records returned by your query.

$author = mysql_result($result,$number_of_records,"author");

that will return the "author" field of hte last row. I didn't actually know you could do that with mysql_result...I always thought the field had to be field number, I didn't realize it could be the name. Neat.

As for what I did...it's a good idea to get good coding habits set up, so let me explain. What you did was (basically):

echo ("Blah and $blah");

the () are unnecessary, so I dropped them. Secondly, when you have an echo surrounded by " (double quotes) you're tellilng PHP that it needs to parse the string. That means it looks all through there for special characters and variables and shit. That is slow. Using single quotes tells it not to parse the string, ie

echo 'blah and $blah';

of course now, it doesn't parse the $blah so it actually returns $blah instead of whatever variable $blah is. The fix for that would be

echo 'blah';
echo $blah;

using cocatenation, you can turn that into

echo 'blah' .$blah;

Then I just strung that together for your full statement.

There's nothing technically wrong with the way you did it, but if you want code that executes quickly and with a minimum of overhead, I suggest you do it my way. As an aside, you may notice concatenation being used in the SQL statement defintion in your code.

Thanks for the input.

Well, Over the past few hours, i've gotten my self a log-in-able blog, that shows the last three records!

Not majorly secure, I know, but it's good enough for tonight.

One question - When I enter in a review, if I type in an apastrophe, it complains about syntax error - like it's parsing the stuff I enter as php or something?

Any idea what sort of stuff you can do to stop that?

when you convert you $_POST to a regular variable, addslashes on it...ie

$text=addslashes($_POST[text]);

you're running into those hacks we're talking about.

If you have the ability to edit your php.ini. you should turn magic_quotes on.

hmm, I dunno if i do have permision to edit the server php.ini - but I can get them to do it for me.

Satis: Can I add more than one thing to the POST part? Because I already have htmlentities there. (hehe, tities)

if you're asking if you can run more than one function on the $_POST, yes, you can run as many as you want.

ie:

$text = addslashes(htmlentities($_POST[text]));

you can wrap as many together as you want. I think my record is 4 or 5. Pig probably has twice as many.

The only time I every wrapped more than 4 or 5 function calls like that, was because I didn't know what I was doing. I think I was using str_replace, and didn't realize you could use an array as the search parameter.

If you can get magic_quotes turned on, you should. Just realize that using add_slashes is redundant, and you should not do both. Just one or the other.

I often use a script I wrote called purge_text() that I feed all user input through. It checks if magic_quotes is on, and adds them manually if it is not. It also does strip_tags, htmlspecialchars, trim, and maybe another function or two.

thanks guys