php + postgresql

First, thanks to everyone who responded to my newbie questions
yesterday, all clear now.

I spent most of today struggling with apparently inconsistent behaviour
while running SELECT statements on PG 8.1.9 using PHP 5.1.6 (these are
both as supplied with CentOS 5.1, a fairly conservative distro).

It seems that some of PHP's PG functions have changed recently, are
there any known issues with them?

1.
I ended up using pg_prepare() and pg_execute() as pg_query() alone just
didn't seem to work. But SELECT statements seemed to be cached or
persistent in some way, such that they "lived" beyond the life of the
PHP script. Is there something I need to know about persistent behaviour
in PG that doesn't exist in MySQL?

2.
Another problem was that no matter how many times I checked and
re-checked code, or which pg_fetch_* function I used, copying an array
member and trying to use it later just would not work, eg

while ($row = pg_fetch_array($query)) {
$content = $row[0]
}

echo $content;

$content was always 'undeclared'.

3.
Some examples I found used PHP's pg_num_rows() function to count the
rows in a result, then iterated through them with a "for" loop ... is
this required behaviour (PHP docs don't appear to discuss this)?

4.
Another weird one was that this statement always failed:

$name = "file.php";
SELECT fld_content FROM tbl_page WHERE fld_name='$name'

while this one always worked:

SELECT fld_content FROM tbl_page WHERE fld_pid=1

in a three column table:

fld_pid serial PRIMARY KEY,
fld_name varchar(100) NOT NULL,
fld_content text NOT NULL

while everything worked fine from the psql console.

... but this post is getting too unwieldy. I am reading documentation
but am also under some pressure to get basic things up and running. Any
pointers to good documentation covering PHP + PG, or any well known gotchas?

PS If people want to throw MySQL->PostgreSQL gotchas at me I'm happy to
collate and write up.

Thanks again
Mick