Jeff schrieb:
>
> Could someone please tell me how I might determine the column type (char
> vs. integer is good enough) if I know the column name?

Take a look at the SHOW commands in the mysql manual.
SHOW CREATE TABLE already has the information you need, but IIRC it's
just a single text string that would need to be parsed, and I also
recall that there are variants of the SHOW command that will return
parsed information.

Regards,
Jo