Question

I don’t know how to phrase this question nor how to look it up properly. I have tried many searches worded differently but haven’t come up with anything yet. I am very new to mysql and php so sorry for any noobish remarks.

+---+-----------+---------+
|state  |County |people   |
+---+-----------+---------+
|state1 | a     | person1 |
|state1 | a     | person2 |
|state1 | b     | person3 |
|state2 | c     | person4 |
|state2 | d     | person5 |
+---+-----------+---------+

This is a very short example of the table that i am dealing with.
I am looking for a way to get the first county for each state. This is a webpage for a map of all the different people’s location of where they mentor students, so there is a lot more to the table.

Choose State

-State1  -State2

Counties in State1:
 -a      -b

County a in State1:
-Person1 
-Person2

I want to have it so when you click state1’s href link, it will have county a as the default to show which people are in that state. Otherwise it will show the last selection or default to a county in a different state. Then you can click any of the county’s href links that show up for that state.

I keep thinking that i can just search for state1 in the table and then get the first county but i don’t know how to do that. I keep thinking i can do:

($row['State'])['County']

but that seems really illegal with php

Answer 1

Your usage of this thing seems completely unrelated (although perfectly fine), but to answer your literal question, you can use LIMIT:

select county         -- we want the county name
from table            -- your table name here
where state='state1'  -- your search criteria
order by county       -- alphabetical ordering to select the first county (if needed)
limit 1               -- and we only care about the first!