In what situations should the use of mysqli_fetch_array() be preferred over other methods in PHP?

When you need to fetch rows from a MySQL database result set and access the data both by column name and by index, mysqli_fetch_array() should be preferred over other methods. This function returns an array that contains both associative and numeric indices, allowing for flexible data access. 

// Connect to the database
$conn = mysqli_connect("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

// Execute a query
$result = mysqli_query($conn, "SELECT * FROM table");

// Fetch rows using mysqli_fetch_array()
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) {
    // Access data by column name
    echo $row['column_name'];
    
    // Access data by index
    echo $row[0];
}

Keywords

mysqli_fetch_array PHP data retrieval MySQL database integration

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