Question

I am learning php and made a simple application to save peoples names to a database then pull all the saved names into a list lower down on the page.

this is the code that is getting the names: echo "<div class=\"results\"> $row[Name] </div>";

I put a div with the class of results so that I could style it. At this point all I wanted to do was center the results. After styling it with css to be centered, looking at the page source each name that was echo’ed has a div around it with the class of results. They are all centered like I wanted which is good but this does not seem like the best way to do it because there will be a new div created for every new name in the database (right now there are 18 divs. Way too many!).I was hoping only one div would be created but I was obviously wrong about that.

So, is it possible to pre-create a div in the html markup with nothing in and echo the names into the div? Or do you think there would be a way to make it all output at once so it was all within the one div?

Here is the rest of the code so you get an idea of whats happening:

<?php 
$connect = mysql_connect("localhost","user","0123");
if(!$connect){
    die("Failed to connect: " . mysql_error());
}

if(!mysql_select_db("Test")) {
    die("Failed to select database: " . mysql_error());
}

$results = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM Friends");

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($results)){
    echo "<div class=\"results\"> $row[Name] </div>";
}

if ($_POST[name] !="") { $sql="INSERT INTO Friends 
(name) VALUES('$_POST[name]')";

if (!mysql_query($sql,$connect))
  {
  die('Error: ' . mysql_error());
  }
echo "<div id=\"added\"> $_POST[name] added to the database </div>";
}
else die("")

?>

Answer 1

Since you output the div inside your while loop, you will get a new div for each result. Just move the div outside the loop:

echo "<div class=\"results\">";
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($results)){
    echo $row['Name'];
}
echo "</div>";

Note that you should always quote your keys. Use $row['Name'] instead of $row[Name] (obviously not if Name is a defined constant).