Question

I have a database with a vertical schema, explained:

Key, Cat, UID, Var, Val, etc…
Where Key is the index, Cat is the category, UID is the identifier for a group of rows, var is the name of the value the row represents and Val is that value. So a few rows would look something like this:

key cat   uid    var          val
 1   1   98765  name         David
 2   1   98765  description  handsome, young, sporting, 
 3   1   98765  phone        [phone]
 4   1   98765  email        [e-mail]
 5   1   12345  name         Jason
 6   1   12345  description  cool, hot, tall, 
 7   1   12345  phone        [phone]
 8   1   12345  email        [e-mail]
 8   1   12345  website      www.jason.com

So the goal with the query/php is to get all rows from a specified category, then return an associative array based on the uid for all the rows with that uid. The result would be somehting like

results{
["98765"] => ["name"] = David
          => ["description"] = handsome, young, sporting,
          => ["phone"] = 123-456-789
          => ["email"] = [e-mail]
["12345"] => ["name"] = Jason
          => ["description"] = cool, hot, tall,
          => ["phone"] = 222-555-1244
          => ["email"] = [e-mail]
          => ["website"] = www.jason.com
}

Hopefully that’s understandable, let me know if my question is unclear.

Answer 1

Try something like this:

$category = 1;
$result = mysql_query( 'SELECT * FROM table WHERE cat = ' . intval( $category));
$results = array();
while( $row = mysql_fetch_array( $result))
{
    $results[ $row['uid'] ][ $row['var'] ] = $row['val'];
}
mysql_free_result( $result);