How to resolve ambiguous column names when retrieving results?

You can either use the numerical indices ($row[0]) or better, use AS in the MySQL:

SELECT *, user.id AS user_id FROM ...

I just figured this out. It's probably a bad practice but it worked for me in this case.

I am one of the lazy people who doesn't want to alias or write out every column name with a table prefix.

You can select all of the columns from a specific table by using table_name.* in your select statement.

When you have duplicated column names, mysql will overwrite from first to last. The data from the first duplicated column name will be overwritten when it encounters that column name again. So the duplicate column name that comes in last wins.

If I am joining 3 tables, each containing a duplicated column name, the order of the tables in the select statement will determine what data I am getting for the duplicate column.

Example:

SELECT table1.* , table2.* , table3.* FROM table1 LEFT JOIN table2 ON table1.dup = table2.dup LEFT JOIN table3 ON table2.dup = table3.dup;

In the example above, the value of dup I get will be from table3.

What if I want dup to be the value from table1?

Then I need to do this:

SELECT table3.* , table2.* , table1.* FROM table1 LEFT JOIN table2 ON table1.dup = table2.dup LEFT JOIN table3 ON table2.dup = table3.dup;

Now, table1 comes last, so the value of dup will be the value from table1.

I got the value I wanted for dup without having to write out every single freaking column and I still get all of the columns to work with. Yay!

I know the value of dup should be the same in all 3 tables, but what if table3 doesn't have a matching value for dup? Then dup would be blank in the first example, and that would be a bummer.

You can set aliases for the columns that you are selecting:

$query = 'SELECT news.id AS newsId, user.id AS userId, [OTHER FIELDS HERE] FROM news JOIN users ON news.user = user.id'