MySQL & PHP- Show Tables In Database

Someone asked me the other day how to display the existing tables in their database with a PHP script. The query itself is pretty simple, but people seem to get confused about the PHP side of it. Then again, once you look at the code, you might be surprised how easy it really is…

Printing tables with PHP

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<?
$showtablequery = "
	SHOW TABLES
	FROM
	[database]
	";
 
$showtablequery_result	= mysql_query($showtablequery);
while($showtablerow = mysql_fetch_array($showtablequery_result))
{
	echo $showtablerow[0]."<br />";
}
 
?>

That query will show ALL tables, but you can use a LIKE function in the query as well, to get particular tables only.

Printing particular tables with PHP

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<?
$showtablequery = "
	SHOW TABLES
	FROM
	[database]
	LIKE
	'%brightcherry%'
	";
 
$showtablequery_result	= mysql_query($showtablequery);
while($showtablerow = mysql_fetch_array($showtablequery_result))
{
	echo $showtablerow[0]."<br />";
}
 
?>

That query will pull out all tables with the word ‘brightcherry’ in.