Laravel: getting a a single value from a MySQL query

yet another edit: As of version 5.2 pluck is not deprecated anymore, it just got new behaviour (same as lists previously - see side-note below):

edit: As of version 5.1 pluck is deprecated, so start using value instead:

DB::table('users')->where('username', $username)->value('groupName');    

// valid for L4 / L5.0 onlyDB::table('users')->where('username', $username)->pluck('groupName');

this will return single value of groupName field of the first row found.

SIDE NOTE reg. @TomasButeler comment: As Laravel doesn't follow sensible versioning, there are sometimes cases like this. At the time of writing this answer we had pluck method to get SINGLE value from the query (Laravel 4.* & 5.0).

Then, with L5.1 pluck got deprecated and, instead, we got value method to replace it.

But to make it funny, pluck in fact was never gone. Instead it just got completely new behaviour and... deprecated lists method.. (L5.2) - that was caused by the inconsistency between Query Builder and Collection methods (in 5.1 pluck worked differently on the collection and query, that's the reason).

Edit:

Sorry i forgot about pluck() as many have commented :Easiest way is :

return DB::table('users')->where('username', $username)->pluck('groupName');

Which will directly return the only the first result for the requested row as a string.

Using the fluent query builder you will obtain an array anyway.I mean The Query Builder has no idea how many rows will come back from that query.Here is what you can do to do it a bit cleaner

$result = DB::table('users')->select('groupName')->where('username', $username)->first();

The first() tells the queryBuilder to return only one row so no array, so you can do :

return $result->groupName;

Hope it helps

As of Laravel >= 5.3, best way is to use value:

$groupName = \App\User::where('username',$username)->value('groupName');

or

use App\User;//at top of controller$groupName = User::where('username',$username)->value('groupName');//inside controller function

Of course you have to create a model User for users table which is most efficient way to interact with database tables in Laravel.