So I recently came across this scenario where I needed to retrieve data using the mysqli_fetch_assoc() function but was not getting any output. My code was running and it wasn't giving me any errors. I tried using mysqli_num_rows to check if there was a result and it returned 1, meaning there was a result. So if you're in the same situation, I hope this will help. I had the following code: $query = "SELECT id FROM users WHERE id = $user_id"; $result = mysqli_query($con, $query); $row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result); echo $row['username']; After hours of cracking my head, going through my code and countless Google searches I finally realized my mistake. If you take a closer look at the code above, you will realise that I am only selecting the id column from the users table. The result will thus be a table with a single column- id. So if I check whether the query returned a result, the answer will be yes. However that result does not contain the 'userna