MySQL text field issues

Question

This is quite a noobish question, I have searched for a few hours now and I know this has to be simple. I am using XAMPP and I am trying to learn some more about using PHP and mySQL together. When I create the DB and the table for information to store, I tried insert info to the table and it stores it as a .dat file rather than text. I know this has to be with how I am setting up the table or the DB but I have gone through things and I think I am just skipping over something.

* Apache/2.2.12 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.12 OpenSSL/0.9.8k mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.0 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0
* MySQL client version: 5.1.37
* PHP extension: mysqli

that is the phpmyadmin info.

Answer 1

When you're editing table field's properties, there is one which affect presentation of the field data in phpMyAdmin: "Browser transformation". When it is set to "application/octetstream: download" for some field, phpMyAdmin instead of displaying text "as is", allows to download its content as a (binary) file and displays that as a "binary_file.dat" url to that file.

You can change this behavior by changing "Browser transformation" for your text field to something else (an empty value would be good).

Answer 2

Are you saying that when you do something like

SELECT textfield FROM datatable;

on your database, you get a result that looks like:

+-----------------+
|    textfield    |
+-----------------+
| binary_file.dat |
+-----------------+

instead of getting the contents of the file you'd tried to insert?