Question

I am fetching an array of animal names, types, age, etc. from a MySQL DB. I want to divide these into sections for ages like so…

Ages 5 - 10
Dog named Brian
Cat named Kitty
Dog named Buster

Ages 10+
Cat named Moody
Dog named Milo

Here’s how I am doing it right now (the query is already order by age):

while ($results = mysql_fetch_array($animals) {

if (($results[age] <= 10 && $results[age] >= 5) && !$head1 && !$head1display) {
    $head1 = 'Ages 5 to 10<br />';
    $head1display++;
} else $head1  = NULL;

if ($results[age] > 10 && !$head2 & !$head2display) {
    $head2 = 'Ages 10+<br />';
    $head2display++;
} else $head2  = NULL;  

echo $head1.$head2.$results[type].' named '.$results[name].'<br />';

}

Is there a better way to do this? Keep in mind I don’t want to have two queries or two loops…

Answer 1

I would suggest using doing grouping/ordering in your SQL to fetch the animals already in the right way, such as:

$sql = "select type, name, if(age<5, 'Ages <5', if(age<10, 'Ages 5 - 10', 'Ages 10+)) "heading"
        from animals
        order by age";

Then in you php you can do almost direct output:

$heading = '';
while ($results = mysql_fetch_array($animals) {
    if($results['heading'] != $heading) {
        $heading = $results['heading'];
        echo '<br/>' . $heading . '<br/>';
    }
    echo $results['type'].' named '.$results['name'].'<br />';
}