Question

I have a bit of PHP code which I need to return an even number of results from a MySQL database. I’m using the mysqli extension to execute my query.

My code is approximately this at the moment:

//assume we already have a database connection  $query = 'SELECT id              FROM movies             WHERE publish = 1              AND showimage = 1         ORDER BY date DESC            LIMIT 6';  $result = $connection->query($query);  while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {     //do some stuff } 

As you can see, I’m limiting the query to 6 rows, but in some conditions, fewer will be returned. If only 3 rows are returned, I want to throw away the last row and only keep 2.

How can I do this in the MySQL query or in MySQLi?

Answer 1

I’d imagine something like this:

// row counter $counter = 1; // loop through each row while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {     // If there is more than one row remaining      // OR if the current row can be divided by two     if (($result->num_rows - $counter) > 1 || ($counter % 2)) {         // result code for even rows         $counter++;     } else {         // break out of the loop         break;     } }