Question

I am using a for loop to generate a table for a SQL query’s results. I am trying to alter the code so that new text is echoed into a specific column of the table (column 8)

$fields_num = mysql_num_fields($result);

echo "<h1>Table: {$table}</h1>";
echo "<table border='0' id=resultTable><tr>";


for($i=0; $i<$fields_num; $i++)
{
    $field = mysql_fetch_field($result);
    echo "<td id" . $i;
    echo "></td>";
}

echo "</tr>\n";
// printing table rows
while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
    echo "<tr>";

    // $row is array... foreach( .. ) puts every element
    // of $row to $cell variable
    foreach($row as $cell)
        echo "<td>$cell</td>";

    echo "</tr>\n";
}
mysql_free_result($result);
?>

Answer 1

what actually do you mean by “new text” in “I am trying to alter the code so that new text is echoed into a specific column of the table”?

Is “text” the name of a particular table field? If so, it would be better to alter the sequence of the fields in the mysql_query that you are using instead of doing any change in the html generation for this

e.g.

SELECT field1, field2, ... new_text from ... 

Put new_text in the eighth position.

Update
If you want to display various things for various columns in the result table, you can put a counter and do what you want as per count like this:-

// printing table rows
while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
    echo "<tr>";

    // $row is array... foreach( .. ) puts every element
    // of $row to $cell variable
    $counter = 0;
    foreach($row as $cell)
    {
        if($counter == 7)
        {//eighth column
            echo "<td><img src='".$cell."' /></td>";
        }
        else if($counter == 5)
        {//sixth col
            echo //something else ...
        }
        else
            echo "<td>$cell</td>";
            //inside your default td
        $counter++;
    }

    echo "</tr>\n";
}

But it would be more readable,maintainable and customizable to have some config array where you specify which column is going to hold what like this:-

function getColumnConfigs()
{
   return $columnsConfigs = array(5=> "something_else", 7 => "img");
   //specify special cases for necessary columns. columns not mentioned here will take default.
}

and then use this in your iteration:-

 // printing table rows
$columnsConfig = getColumnConfigs();
while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
    echo "<tr>";

    // $row is array... foreach( .. ) puts every element
    // of $row to $cell variable
    $counter = 0;
    foreach($row as $cell)
    {
        if(isset($columnsConfig[$counter]))
        {
            switch($columnsConfig[$counter])
            {
                 case "img":
                              $html = "<td><img src='".$cell."' /></td>";
                              break;
                 case "something_else"
                              $html = "<td><img src='".$cell."' /></td>";
                              break;
            } 
        }
        else
        {//default
            $html = echo "<td>$cell</td>";
        }

    }

    echo "</tr>\n";
}