Not meaning to beat the proverbial dead horse I am developing a web portal that has to display the tables in the DB via a > form/script. The web page has a login with user and password. Right now I > am just trying to connect. > This for a commercial app - the client wants both an API connect via PHP > and a web portal in which they can login from a web page and view the > tables in the DB. Right now I am just trying to get the form/PHP > interaction to work. > This sounds like a very good use statement for http://www.phpmyadmin.net/<http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/> You can set it for http auth in the config ... they enter a mysql username and password and they only see the databases and tables you want them to see Might be easier than reinventing the wheel and stressing all of us :)