MySQL C API using results - mysql

Question

I am using the MySQL C API to query the database and I have the results stored in MYSQL_ROW types. I am able to print the results to the console with
printf("%s", row[0]);
however, according to the MySQL C API documentation, I cannot use them as null-terminated strings.
At the bottom of the function overview, they say I can "extract" the information with mysql_store_result() or mysql_use_result(). However, I am still confused as to how this is done.
Ideally, I want to use the results as a string so I can do stuff like strcmp, but otherwise I definitely need to use the information somehow with those two functions.
Can somebody show me an example of how to do this?

Answer 1

Basically, you call mysql_store_result() or mysql_use_result() to access the result set, the former loads all the rows into memory on the client side, the latter accesses rows one at a time from the server. If you use mysql_use_result(), you need to call mysql_fetch_row() to access each row until the function returns NULL. Each successful call to mysql_fetch_row() will return a MYSQL_ROW which you can use to access the individual field values.
Since the fields are not nul-terminated, you need to use mysql_fetch_lengths() to get the lengths of each of the fields so that you can copy them somewhere else via memcpy, etc.
Since the field values are not nul-terminated you will need to add your own NUL character when you make the copy if you want to use it as a string. Be aware that the field values may contain binary data, so if you do treat it as a string, functions that expect a C string will stop processing data if it encounters a nul-character in the data.
Here is an example from the documentation that should help you put all this together:
MYSQL_ROW row;
unsigned int num_fields;
unsigned int i;
num_fields = mysql_num_fields(result);
while ((row = mysql_fetch_row(result)))
{
unsigned long *lengths;
lengths = mysql_fetch_lengths(result);
for(i = 0; i < num_fields; i++)
{
printf("[%.*s] ", (int) lengths[i],
row[i] ? row[i] : "NULL");
}
printf("\n");
}