Select a value from table and reserve it - mysql

Question

Low level question but, I understand that you can select elements from a table using:
$sql = "SELECT blah FROM TABLE WHERE this = 'something' ";
But when I try to select a specific value from my table, where let's say a user has no tries left so if I try to grab how many tries they have left with:
$sql = "SELECT tries FROM table WHERE user = 'something'";
How would I grab that value specifically if it was 5 or 9? I tried setting a variable equal to something I $sql off my table but it doesn't grab the value.
Edit
I have a database that has a table called Item which contains: id, name, value, and stock of a particular item. If a user wants to order that item I will first check it if's in stock with a function, to see if it is not in stock then a error message is printed, otherwise accept the order.
Extremely primitive since I'm just trying to get grab the stock value first.
$query = $_GET['query']; //id I get from the specified item
echo 'the id is: ' .$query.''; //test purposes
$mysql_handle = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass)
or die("Error connecting to database server");
mysql_select_db($dbname, $mysql_handle)
or die("Error selecting database: $dbname");
$sql1 = "SELECT item_stock FROM chat-db.Item WHERE id = '".$query."'";
echo '' .$sql2. ''; //test purposes
whats the correct way to assign the value from that specific stock to a variable?

Answer 1

If you want to grab rows with a set of possible values you can use 'IN' such as:
Get all columns from users table where users have 5 or 9 tries:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE tries IN('5', '9'); or
If you want to select where the user has no tries left, assuming the tries column is a numeric type you can look for rows with 0 tries:
Get all columns from Item table where stock is 0:
SELECT * FROM db_inv.Item WHERE stock = '0';
Get all columns from users table where tries is 0:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE tries = '0';
As for your php code you should be able to do the following:
$query = $_GET['query']; //id I get from the specified item
echo 'the id is: ' . $query; //test purposes
$mysql_handle = mysqli_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die("Error connecting to database server");
$sql1 = "SELECT item_stock FROM chat-db.Item WHERE id = '".$query."'";
$results = mysqli_query($mysql_handle, $sql1);
if (!empty($results) && mysqli_num_rows($results) > 0) {
while($rec = mysqli_fetch_array($results)) {
echo $rec['item_stock'];
}
}