Selecting from MySql

[12many]

Hi There

Im new to php and im writing a webservice that communicates with a My sql database, when i select database all the examples do it like this

$result = mysql_query('select * from Hire_Codes');
	if (mysql_num_rows($result) > 0)
	{
		$response["equip"] = array();
		While ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
		{
			$equip = array();
			$equip["Code"] = $row["Code"];
			$equip["Description"] = $row["Description"];
			array_push($response["equip"], $equip);
		}
		$response["Success"] = 1;
		echo json_encode($response);	
	}

which is fine but...
what if i don't want to have to hard code my column names?? basically i want to be able to use something similar to this that can handle a posted MySql Select statement.
is it possible to extract the column name from row in this instance?

Many thanks

Ian