Attn: PDO Experts (COUNT query)

Question

This is an example of the type of a PHP/MySQL query I use to display dynamic web pages. This particular query is associated with a website/section that displays URL's like MySite/People/Crazy_Horse, where Crazy_Horse = both $MyURL and a value in the field URL, table people...
$res = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(URL)
  FROM people
  WHERE URL = '$MyURL' AND Site = 'PX'
  OR '$MyURL' = CONCAT('Washington/', URL) AND Site = 'SM'");
  if (!$res) {
    die('Invalid query: ' . mysql_error());
$result = mysql_result($res, 0);
// PART 2 - Interpret the results...
switch ($result)
case 1:
// include related files
break;
case 0:
// include 404 NOT FOUND error message
break;
default:
// multiple entries; deal with as needed
break;
Now I'm trying to learn PDO, and I assumed the simplest queries would be the simplest to convert to PDO. To my surprise, many online references say PDO can't perform COUNT queries! As I understand it, all the PDO queries that do this sort of thing are workarounds. After consulting several tutorials and forums and trying several scripts, I still don't have a working model. This is what I'm trying at the moment:
I start out with my PDO database connection (replacing "USERNAME" and "PASSWORD" with my username and password, of course...
try {
    $db = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=db_new;charset=utf8', 'USERNAME', 'PASSWORD');
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    print "Error!: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br/>";
    die();
The above code is on a separate file that's included in every page on my website.
I then have this code on a downstream file...
$sql= "SELECT URL FROM people
WHERE URL = '$MyURL'";
$stmt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute();
$total = $stmt->rowCount();
But it doesn't work, and there's no error message to indicate what the problem is. (However, if I modify my username or password in the connection script, I do get an error message referring to my database connection.) Once I do get it to work, I assume I can finish the job by simply replacing $result with $total...
switch ($total)
case 1:
// include related files
break;
case 0:
// include 404 NOT FOUND error message
break;
default:
// multiple entries; deal with as needed
break;
Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong, and how I can fix it?
Thanks.

Answer 1

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