How to Retrieve Column Names from a Table Using PDO in PHP?

Getting Column Names using PDO in PHP

How can you retrieve the column names from a specified table using PHP Data Objects (PDO)? Consider the following table:

id	name	age
1	Alan	35
2	Alex	52
3	Amy	15

Our objective is to obtain the column names:

| id | name | age |

Original Code Attempt:

The code provided in the question uses the columnCount() and getColumnMeta() methods to count and retrieve the column metadata, respectively. However, this approach retrieves additional information beyond just the column names.

Solution using MySQL-Specific Method:

For MySQL databases, you can directly query the "DESCRIBE" information using the following code:

<code class="php">$table_fields = $dbh->query("DESCRIBE tablename")->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_COLUMN);</code>

The above code will return an array containing the column names:

id

name

age

This solution is MySQL-specific and does not work for other database types. For a generic solution that supports all PDO-compatible databases, consider using the following function:

<code class="php">function get_column_names($table, $pdo) {
    try {
        $stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM $table LIMIT 0");
        $stmt->execute();
        $column_names = array_map(function ($meta) { return $meta['name']; }, $stmt->getColumnMeta());
        return $column_names;
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        return false;
    }
}</code>

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