How to Check if value exists in a MySQL database

Suppose I have this table:

id | name | city
------------------
1  | n1   | c1
2  | n2   | c2
3  | n3   | c3
4  | n4   | c4

I want to check if the value c7 exists under the variable city or not.

If it does, I will do something.
If it doesn’t, I will do something else.

Answer

preferred way, using MySQLi extension (supported from PHP 5 onwards):

$mysqli = new mysqli(SERVER, DBUSER, DBPASS, DATABASE);
$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT id FROM mytable WHERE city = 'c7'");
if($result->num_rows == 0) {
     // row not found, do stuff...
} else {
    // do other stuff...
}
$mysqli->close();

---

deprecated and not supported in PHP 7 or newer:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT id FROM mytable WHERE city = 'c7'");
if(mysql_num_rows($result) == 0) {
     // row not found, do stuff...
} else {
    // do other stuff...
}