Drupal 7 Module Development

Appendix A
Result objects
The return value from a db_query() call is result object. In order to access the data
returned by the database server, we need to iterate over the result set.
$list = array();
foreach ($result as $record) {
$list[] = t('@name: @filename', array(
'@name' => $record->name,
'@filename' => $record->filename,
));
}
By default, each $record in the result set is a stdClass object. We can, however, get
the record as an associative array by telling the db_query() call that we want arrays
instead. Here's how it is done:
$result = db_query("SELECT name, filename FROM {system} WHERE type =
:type AND status = :status", array(':type' => 'module', ':status' =>
1), array('fetch' => PDO::FETCH_ASSOC));
Here, we specify a third parameter to db_query(), which is another associative
array of options. We specify only one option, the fetch mode, which we set to
PDO::FETCH_ASSOC. This tells the database layer we want associative arrays
instead of stdClass objects.
We can also fetch a single record, or even just a single field:
// Fetch a single record as an object.
$record = $result->fetchObject();
// Fetch a single record as an array.
$record = $result->fetchAssoc();
// Fetch just the first field of the next record.
$field = $result->fetchField();
// Fetch the entire result set at once into an array.
$records = $result->fetchAll();
See the online documentation for more details about various ways to retrieve data
from a result set.
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