current row id or row number in php mysql query

Is there any way to get the row id or row number from the result set in php mysql query? What is the use of _rowid in mysql?

The following query fetch the details of applicant 2435

SELECT * FROM applications WHERE _rowid =2435

but here _开发者_C百科rowid is not a field of the table. Like this we need to get the record id from a result set in php mysql.

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Extracted from this question:

SELECT @row_number := NULL;
SELECT
    @row_number := IFNULL(@row_number, 0) + 1 AS row_number,
    Column1,
    Column2,
    ColumnN
FROM the_table
WHERE 1 = 1
ORDER BY Column1

If you are running this query from PHP, you need to execute the mysql_query() function twice. First query would be SELECT @row_number := NULL and second one would be the SELECT ... query. Both queries must be executed together over same connection.

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Check this function mysql_insert_id