What are the potential pitfalls of storing ingredient quantities as text in a MySQL database when dealing with recipe scaling in PHP?

Storing ingredient quantities as text in a MySQL database can make it difficult to perform calculations for recipe scaling in PHP. To solve this issue, you should store ingredient quantities as numerical values in the database. This will allow you to easily manipulate and scale the quantities using PHP. 

// Example code to store ingredient quantities as numerical values in MySQL database

// Connect to MySQL database
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "dbname");

// Create a table to store ingredients with numerical quantities
$query = "CREATE TABLE ingredients (
            id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
            name VARCHAR(255),
            quantity DECIMAL(10,2)
          )";
$mysqli->query($query);

// Insert ingredient with numerical quantity
$name = "Flour";
$quantity = 2.5;
$query = "INSERT INTO ingredients (name, quantity) VALUES ('$name', $quantity)";
$mysqli->query($query);

// Retrieve ingredients with numerical quantities
$query = "SELECT * FROM ingredients";
$result = $mysqli->query($query);

// Display ingredients with quantities
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo $row['name'] . ": " . $row['quantity'] . "<br>";
}

// Close database connection
$mysqli->close();

Keywords

MySQL PHP recipe scaling data type conversion error

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