Question: I am trying to add a feature to a website built with Laravel.
There is a table containing vote numbers and user. I want to get the total points a user has in a certain category. I do not have any PHP or Laravel experience but said I would give this a shot.

```
$votes1 = UserVotes::select ('select vote from user_votes where feedback_id = ? and feedback_type = 1',  Auth::user()->id);

```

This should return an object containing the vote amount. I want to interrogate the the object to check if the vote number is above a certain amount and then do something based on that being the case or not.

```
if vote > 50{
    //do stuff 
}

foreach ($votes1 as $vote1) {
     echo $vote1->vote;
}

```

The query should return 1. I have verified this by querying the database, so the problem is with my understanding of Laravel or php. What I am doing wrong?

Answer: 
Run your string through this first:

mysql\_real\_escape\_string($string);

It'll fix it for ya
try using this way
in your sql query---

```
$m1=$_REQUEST['message'];
$msg='".str_replace("\"","&quot;",str_replace("'","''",$m1))."';

```

hope this will help