I was having a hard time figuring out what the problem with my mysql query was, and so this might help someone.I had a column named in my table called ‘default’ which was just a tinyint (or boolean) 1 or 0 so that I could indicate if the row was meant to be the default row for a page. However my query that said:

“select * from table where default=1″   

Wasn’t working at all.It was giving me the same unhelpful error “you have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual blablabla”.Then I rememberd that the word “default” in mysql syntax is used to specify what you want the default value to be for a column when you are setting up a new one.

So if you use it as a column name it wont work and will go mental.I then changed it to be “isdefault” and it worked fine.It soon came to my attention that it’s a really dumb idea to label your column names anything that might conflict with some mysql query code.

In the same way it wouldn’t make sense to name a column “where” or “select” or “update” or any other mysql syntaxy word.But you probably aren’t idiots and already know this…. 

To round any number or integer values in PHP it’s simple.number_format is useful function that you can use. It takes 2 values: the $NumberYouWantToFormat and then the number of decimal places you want it to be formatted to. 

$total = 34.128252 echo number_format($total, 2); 

This will produce:

34.13 

It’s a simple thing, but really useful.