David, Sascha thank you both for your help. Using the query $query = "SELECT * FROM clients WHERE clientid = '$term'"; echo $query . '<br />'; $result = mysql_query($query); as suggested printed out the below SELECT * FROM clients WHERE clientid = '' This seems to indicate that it is not seeing the value within the single quotes. However a slight caveats to that If I change what is contained within the quotes to a specific number then it does read it, for example SELECT * FROM clients WHERE clientid = '123456'; So it is only when I enclose a value that it doesn't compute, I tried putting the $term within %% like so $query = "SELECT * FROM clients WHERE clientid = '%".$term"%'"; however this just returns we page not found, possibly because I need to use the LIKE parameter in there somewhere? Many thanks for all your help on this Kind Regards Oliver
