I know you can use WHERE with SELECT to get row info from a table but i need to get an entire column of info, ignoring other columns. This is probaly a simple thing, but I have been searching and searching with no success. I am using PHP to communicate with my MySQL DB.

Basically, what i want to do is get all the info in one column of my DB and see if it matches to a PHP script that will display an html page based on the info in the column. Am i making sense?

Specific code would be great, i have found many tutorials that scratch at what i want to do(i think), but am having trouble applying it.

is it just as simple as

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM example")
or die(mysql_error());

while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result )) {

if so what do i do next? How can I only look at data from one column? How can my php script compare itself to the mysql column info? sorry for the stupid question.

Thanks in advanced for any help