Are there any alternative methods or functions that can be used to retrieve the result of a count(*) query in PHP?

When using count(*) in a SQL query in PHP, the result is typically retrieved using the fetch_assoc() function. However, an alternative method is to use the fetch_row() function, which returns a numerical array of the query result. This can be useful if you only need the count value and don't require the column names. 

// Connect to database
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Run count(*) query
$sql = "SELECT count(*) as total FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

// Fetch result using fetch_row()
$row = $result->fetch_row();
$count = $row[0];

// Display count value
echo "Total count: " . $count;

// Close connection
$conn->close();

Keywords

SQL count(*) fetchColumn() PDO database

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