First, thank you to everyone who responded to my post of last night. You were very helpful.

On an entirely separate project, I'm busy creating a spelling checker that has multiple possible dictionaries to look through, which will be selected by the user. Each of these dictionaries are stored as a table in MySQL.

I'd like to use DBI and a loop to get at them thusly: 

my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT word FROM ? WHERE word = ?');
foreach my $x (@checklists) {
    $sth->execute($x, $word);
    my $ret = $sth->fetchrow_hashref();
    ...etc...
}

[download]
Where @checklists has all the table names to look at and $word has the word I want to spell-check.

When I run this, though, Perl belches out an SQL error: 

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax ne
+ar ''common_dict' WHERE word = 'aa'' at line 1 at ./quiddler.pl line 
+48.
DBD::mysql::st fetchrow_hashref failed: fetch() without execute() at .
+/quiddler.pl line 49.
Issuing rollback() for database handle being DESTROY'd without explici
+t disconnect().

[download]
When I tried the same statement with an explicit table name, it worked great.

Is what I'm trying to do here even possible? Or must I manually talk to each individual table? If I can do this, what's the proper syntax?

Thanks,
Alex Kirk

In reply to Querying databases in a loop by schnarff

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