select and echo a single field from mysql db using PHP

Im trying to select the title column from a particular row

$eventid = $_G开发者_开发问答ET['id'];
$field = $_GET['field'];
$result = mysql_query("SELECT $field FROM `events` WHERE `id` = '$eventid' ");
echo $result;

all i get is Resource id #19

How should i do this? What is best method?

Try this:

echo mysql_result($result, 0);

This is enough because you are only fetching one field of one row.

$eventid = $_GET['id'];
$field = $_GET['field'];
$result = mysql_query("SELECT $field FROM `events` WHERE `id` = '$eventid' ");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
echo $row[$field];

but beware of sql injection cause you are using $_GET directly in a query. The danger of injection is particularly bad because there's no database function to escape identifiers. Instead, you need to pass the field through a whitelist or (better still) use a different name externally than the column name and map the external names to column names. Invalid external names would result in an error.

Read the manual, it covers it very well: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-query.php

Usually you do something like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  echo $row['firstname'];
  echo $row['lastname'];
  echo $row['address'];
  echo $row['age'];
}

And escape your values with mysql_real_escape_string since PHP6 won't do that for you anymore! :)