Question

I am trying to print the different category’s selected in a single line in xml,
like

<cat_name>meeting, food and drinks, sports</cat_name>

The output I am getting:

<cat_name>meeting, food and drinks, sports,</cat_name> 

I want to remove only the last comma.

The code I have written so far is:

$sq="
    select category_main.cat_name
    from category_main
    join category 
        on(category.cat_id=category_main.cat_id)
    where category.event_id='$event_id'
";
$e=mysql_query($sq);

$xml ='<cat_name>';
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($e))
{
    $res=$row['cat_name'];

    //$new = substr($val,0,-1);
    $xml .="$res, ";                
}

$xml .='</cat_name>';
echo $xml;

Answer 1

Call trim() with the optional second parameter as a ','

trim($cat_name, ',')

However, since you’re doing this in a while loop, you should build an array then implode() it rather than building the string in the loop. This avoids the extra comma to begin with.

$arr = array();
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($e))
{
  $arr[] = $row['cat_name'];
}
$cat_name = implode(",", $arr);
// $cat_name is now "meeting, food and drinks, sports"