Question

I have 2 tables as follow :
table1 has these fields:

year,day,month,name

table2 has these fields:

years,gift

I want to return the rows where year = years. the two queries NEED to be run separately that is a condition.
I CANNOT join them into 1 query (I know how to do that but that’s not how this should be done). Any suggestions? I thought of using a foreach loop but failed to implement, any ideas?

$sql1 = " SELECT * FROM table1 ORDER BY id ASC";
  $result1 = mysql_query($sql1);
  $rows = mysql_fetch_array($result1);
    while($rows = mysql_fetch_array($result1))
  { 
  $year[]         = $rows['year'];
}

$sqlx = "SELECT * FROM table2";
  $result = mysql_query($sqlx); 

  while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
    {
$years[]         = $rows['years'];
}

Answer 1

This is a strange requirement, since it should be done with a join. It is vastly less efficient to do this with multiple queries in a loop than a single query with a JOIN.

In any case if you must do it this way, you have retrieved the years into an array correctly from your first query — use that array to populate the query for each loop iteration of your second query:

  $year = array();
  $sql1 = " SELECT * FROM table1";
  $result1 = mysql_query($sql1);
  if ($result1) {
    $rows = mysql_fetch_array($result1);
    while($rows = mysql_fetch_array($result1))
    { 
      $year[] = $rows['year'];
    }
  }

  // Will hold your output
  $gifts = array();
  // $year is now an array of years.
  // Loop over it to query table2:
  foreach ($year as $y) {
    // Make sure it is an integer...
    $y = intval($y);
    // And query table2 using $y as a WHERE condition
    $sql2 = "SELECT years, gift FROM table2 WHERE years = $y";
    $result2 = mysql_query($sql2);
    if ($result2) {
       while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result2)) {
         // Append all rows to the $gifts array
         $gifts[] = $row;
       }
    }
  }

  // They're now all in the array $gifts.
  var_dump($gifts);

Update:

years on table 1 is a period in years. year in table is a date of when the account was created. so I have to find the difference from today’s date to year on table2. then see if it matches any of the rows on table1. and return the results that match

This can be accomplished with a creative JOIN using date functions. Assuming table2.years is a DATE or DATETIME, use YEAR() to return only the year portion from it, and compare it to YEAR(CURDATE()) for the current year. Join that against the number of years in table1.year.

SELECT 
  table1.*, 
  table2.*
FROM 
  table1
  JOIN table2 
    ON table1.year = (YEAR(CURDATE()) - YEAR(table2.years))