For the last few months I had quite a few MySQL blog posts and didn't have anything from my "new features in PHP [trunk|5.4]" series. This article is a bridge between those two. The PHP 5.4 NEWS file has a small entry:

MySQLi: Added iterator support in MySQLi. mysqli_result implements Traversable. (Andrey, Johannes)

From the outside it is a really small change and easy to miss. The mentioned class, mysqli_result, implements an interface which adds no new methods. What once can't see is that this relates to some internal C-level functions which can be called by the engine for doing a foreach iteration on objects of this class. So with PHP 5.4 you don't have to use an "ugly" while construct anymore to fetch rows from a mysqli result but can simply do a foreach:

mysqli_report(MYSQLI_REPORT_STRICT);
try {
    $mysqli = new mysqli(/* ... */);
    foreach ($myslqi->query("SELECT a, b, c FROM t") as $row) {
        /* Process $row which is an associative array */
    }
} catch (mysqli_sql_exception $e) {
    /* an error happened ... */
}

I'm configuring mysqli in a way to throw exceptions on error. This is useful in this case as mysqli::query() might return false in the case of an error. Passing false to a foreach will give a fatal error, so I'd need a temporary variable and a check in front of the foreach loop, with exceptions I simply do the error handling in the catch block.

One thing to note is that mysqli is using buffered results ("store result") by default. If you want to use unbuffered result sets ("use result") you can easily do that by setting the flag accordingly:

foreach ($myslqi->query("SELECT a, b, c FROM t", MYSQLI_USE_RESULT) as $row) {
    /* ... */
}

People who are advanced with iterators in PHP might ask "Why did you implement Traversable only, not Iterator?" - the main reason is that we simply didn't want to. The mysqli_result class already has quite a few methods and we didn't want to make the interface confusing. If you need an Iterator class for some purpose you can simply wrap mysqli_result in an IteratoIterator.