PHP PDO with foreach and fetch

Question

The following code:

<?php
try {
    $dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=$dbname", $username, $password);
    echo "Connection is successful!<br/>";
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM users";
    $users = $dbh->query($sql);
    foreach ($users as $row) {
        print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
    }
    foreach ($users as $row) {
        print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
    }
    $dbh = null;
}
catch (PDOexception $e) {
    echo "Error is: " . $e-> etmessage();
}

Output:

Connection is successful!

person A-male
person B-female

Running "foreach" twice is not my purpose, I'm just curious why TWO "foreach" statements only output the result once?

Following is the similar case:

<?php
try {
    $dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=$dbname", $username, $password);
    echo "Connection is successful!<br/>";
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM users";
    $users = $dbh->query($sql);
    foreach ($users as $row) {
        print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
    }
    echo "<br/>";
    $result = $users->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
    foreach($result as $key => $value) {
        echo $key . "-" . $value . "<br/>";
    }
    $dbh = null;
}
catch (PDOexception $e) {
    echo "Error is: " . $e-> etmessage();
}

Output:

Connection is successful!

person A-male
person B-female

SCREAM: Error suppression ignored for
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

But when I delete the first "foreach" from the above codes, the output will become normal:

<?php
try {
    $dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=$dbname", $username, $password);
    echo "Connection is successful!<br/>";
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM users";
    $users = $dbh->query($sql);

    echo "<br/>";
    $result = $users->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
    foreach($result as $key => $value) {
        echo $key . "-" . $value . "<br/>";
    }
    $dbh = null;
}
catch (PDOexception $e) {
    echo "Error is: " . $e-> etmessage();
}

Output:

Connection is successful!

user_id-0000000001
name-person A
sex-male

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

A PDOStatement (which you have in $users) is a forward-cursor. That means, once consumed (the first foreach iteration), it won't rewind to the beginning of the resultset.

You can close the cursor after the foreach and execute the statement again:

$users       = $dbh->query($sql);
foreach ($users as $row) {
    print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
}

$users->execute();

foreach ($users as $row) {
    print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
}

Or you could cache using tailored CachingIterator with a fullcache:

$users       = $dbh->query($sql);

$usersCached = new CachedPDOStatement($users);

foreach ($usersCached as $row) {
    print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
}
foreach ($usersCached as $row) {
    print $row["name"] . "-" . $row["sex"] ."<br/>";
}

You find the CachedPDOStatement class as a gist. The caching itertor is probably more sane than storing the resultset into an array because it still offers all properties and methods of the PDOStatement object it has wrapped.