title: Creating a container function for a PDO query in PHP
body: <p>Because I find PDO executions extremely hard to remember and find myself looking back at previous projects or other websites just to remember how to select rows from a database, I decided that I would try and create my own functions that contain the PDO executions and just plug in the data I need. It seemed a lot simpler than it actually is though...</p>
  
  <p>So far I have already created a connect function successfully, but now when it comes to create a select function I'm stumped for multiple reasons.<br>
  For starters there could be a variating amount of args that can be passed into the function and secondly I can't figure out what I should pass to the function and in which order.</p>
  
  <p>So far the function looks like this. <em>To keep me sane, I've added the "id" part to it so I can see what exactly I need to accomplish in the final outcome, and will be replaced by variables accordingly when I work out how to do it.</em></p>
  
  <pre><code>function sql_select($conn, **what to put here**) {
      try {
          $stmt = $conn-&gt;prepare('SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE id = :id');
          $stmt-&gt;execute(array('id' =&gt; $id));
  
          $result = $stmt-&gt;fetchAll();
  
          if ( count($result) ) {
              foreach($result as $row) {
                  print_r($row);
              }
          } else {
              return "No rows returned.";
          }
      } catch(PDOException $e) {
          echo 'ERROR: ' . $e-&gt;getMessage();
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So far what I've established that the function will need to do is</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Connect to the database (using another function to generate the $conn variable, already done)</li>
  <li>Select the table</li>
  <li>Specify the column</li>
  <li>Supply the input to match</li>
  <li>Allow for possible args such as <code>ORDER by 'id' DESC</code></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Lastly from this I would need to create a function to <b><i>insert, update</b></i> and <b><i>delete</i></b> rows from the database.</p>
  
  <p>Or, is there a better way to do this rather than functions?</p>
  
  <p>If anyone could help me accomplish my ambitions to simply simplify PDO executions it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!</p>