Making mysqli easier to use with parameterised queries

Hi Craig, This is a great proposal, and I am delighted that someone is still interested in mysqli and wants to improve it. I will discuss the proposal below, but first some notes about the RFC itself: 1. mysqli_execute() is not deprecated despite what the PHP manual said for the past 14 years. It is just an alias of mysqli_stmt_execute(). It's beyond me why we even have a separate page in the manual for that alias. The mysqli documentation is in such a bad state that there are lies/problems pretty much on every page. 2. Introducing mysqli::execute() would be a great idea, but the name would be terribly confusing with mysqli_stmt::execute(). We need a better name. 3. Please use syntax highlighting. I have already added that for you. I like the proposal, and I think that having a shorthand notation for prepared statement for one-time execution is a brilliant idea. The implementation would not be too difficult, but it would obviously work with mysqlnd only. This in itself is a problem. Ideally, we should drop support for libmysql client but apparently some people think it is still useful. We could emulate the same for libmysql but that would make the implementation more complex. Your implementation example in PHP has a major problem. The binding types should never be guessed based on the value. The type is specified by the column definition. Guessing the type will lead to very undesirable behaviour. 99.99% of the time the values should be bound as strings. If an explicit type cast needs to be performed by mysqli then the long-way can be used instead. Also, rather than binding the variables by reference explicitely, you can use splat operator. This makes the implementation in PHP much simpler: class mysqli_rfc extends mysqli { function execute($sql, $parameters = []) { // Preparing... $statement = $this->prepare($sql); // Binding... if ($parameters) { $statement->bind_param(str_repeat("s", count($parameters)), ...$parameters); } // Executing... $statement->execute(); // Fetching mysqli_result or null (only with mysqlnd) return $statement->get_result(); } } In C code, this could be easily achieved by creating a function that is just a mash-up of all 4 of these functions. I think this would definitely be a nice addition to mysqli, even though I doubt that it will improve the state of mysqli code written by people. After all, we can't force them to use parameter binding. Regards, Kamil On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 at 11:23, Craig Francis <craig@craigfrancis.co.uk> wrote: