PHP and MYSQL newbie question!?

Hi im pretty new to this so hopefully should be pretty easy to answer...

Basically I want to store the output from an SQL statement in a variable, but im not quite sure of the syntax that need to be used. My SQL statement is:

SELECT f_name FROM auth_users WHERE username = 'smithy22'

This should return the name David. David is what I want to store in a variable, so how do I go about doing this? I need to do something like this...

$first_name = SELECT f_name from auth_users where username = 'smithy22';

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks

hi dr_bucks, thanks for your answer, but its the PHP code for storing the output in a variable that I need. The MYSQL statement I have produces the output I require.

mysql_connect("localhost", "dbusername", "dbpassword") or die ("Could not connect to database");
mysql_select_db("dbname") or die ("Could not select database");

$result = mysql_query("SELECT f_name FROM auth_users WHERE username = 'smitty22'");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo $row[f_name] . "<br/>";
}

why not try

SELECT f_name FROM auth_users WHERE username LIKE 'smithy22'

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