select first N columns of MySQL table

Question

As it is possible to select top N rows from table, is there any way to select first N columns from MySQL database tables?
Thanks for your replies and maybe some parts of code in PHP.

Answer 1

SQL requires that you name the columns you want, or else use the * wildcard.

In relational theory, there is no concept of "first N columns" because columns have no implicit order. Of course in any concrete implementation of SQL, they must have some storage order, but the SQL language doesn't have any support for fetching columns by "position" in the table, nor is there any support for fetching sequences of columns (except for *).