Thanks for the responses. I worked through this and got where I needed to be. I was having a lot of trouble understanding how PDO returned the results and populated arrays, and how those arrays could be accessed. Ultimately my code looked something like this:

//connect to the db
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydb', dbuser, dbpw); 

//build the query
$query="SELECT field1, field2
FROM ubertable
WHERE field1 > 6969";

//execute the query
$data = $dbh->query($query);
//convert result resource to array
$result = $data->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

//view the entire array (for testing)
print_r($result);

//display array elements
foreach($result as $output) {
echo output[field1] . " " . output[field1] . "<br />";
}

$conn = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', 'root'); 
mysql_select_db('myDatabase'); 
$result = mysql_query('SELECT myColumn FROM myTable WHERE id="1"', $conn); 
echo $variable = mysql_result($result, 0); 

In the above example we have the table(myTable) with two columns (id) and (myColumn). If I know the value of id of a particular id in a row I can then select a specified column(myColumn) of that row and return a single result. I can then use mysql_result to assign the value to a variable.

Here's what I do (super simplified, I could put together a full example if you need Aaron):

$variables = our query;

so instead of foreach ($variables as $v)…

You can do $variables[0]['whatever'];

Since we know we are working with an array with one set the default is 0. Let me know if you would like a full example or if this was enough for you to understand.

Glad you got it worked out. For next time you could just do

$result[0]['field1'] or $result[0]['field2']. That way you wouldn't have to go through the foreach loop for just one row.