Question

I have a database with a transaction field, this displays products brought on my website. I am trying to develop an admin interface where i can see the products brought.

The string looks like this
37,2:27,1:5,3:94,10:49,15:

This basically means that the customer ordered product ID number 37 with the quantity of 2. Included in their transacvtion was product id 27 with qty 1 and so on.

product_id,ordered_quantity:nextproduct_id,next_orderedquantity.

In order to display this information I need to break this down. I have tried php explode but having some trouble. So we need to split the product on colon : and the qty and id by comma. The string can be one product or many.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Answer 1

$ids = '37,2:27,1:5,3:94,10:49,15';
$products = explode(':', $ids);
$productAndQuantity = array();
foreach ($products as $product) {
    $exploded = explode(',', $product);
    $productAndQuantity[$exploded[0]] = $exploded[1];
}

You get a profuct id – quantity array.

This way of storing data is non-scalable and error-prone. Why not use a table with the following fields: userId, productId, quantity?