Get table column names in MySQL?

I needed column names as a flat array, while the other answers returned associative arrays, so I used:

$con = mysqli_connect('localhost',$db_user,$db_pw,$db_name);
$table = 'people';

/**
* Get the column names for a mysql table
**/

function get_column_names($con, $table) {
  $sql = 'DESCRIBE '.$table;
  $result = mysqli_query($con, $sql);

  $rows = array();
  while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    $rows[] = $row['Field'];
  }

  return $rows;
}

$col_names = function get_column_names($con, $table);

$col_names now equals:

(
    [0] => name
    [1] => parent
    [2] => number
    [3] => chart_id
    [4] => type
    [5] => id
)

this worked for me..

$sql = "desc MyTableName";
$result = @mysql_query($sql);
while($row = @mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    echo $row[0]."<br>";
}

mysqli fetch_field() worked for me:

if ($result = $mysqli -> query($sql)) {
  // Get field information for all fields
  while ($fieldinfo = $result -> fetch_field()) {
    printf("Name: %s\n", $fieldinfo -> name);
    printf("Table: %s\n", $fieldinfo -> table);
    printf("Max. Len: %d\n", $fieldinfo -> max_length);
  }
  $result -> free_result();
}

Source: https://www.w3schools.com/pHP/func_mysqli_fetch_field.asp

The easy way, if loading results using assoc is to do this:

$sql = "SELECT p.* FROM (SELECT 1) as dummy LEFT JOIN `product_table` p on null";
$q = $this->db->query($sql);
$column_names = array_keys($q->row);

This you load a single result using this query, you get an array with the table column names as keys and null as value. E.g.

Array(
'product_id' => null,
'sku' => null,
'price' => null,
...
)

after which you can easily get the table column names using the php function array_keys($result)