Question

I have a MySQL database table which holds 6 types of records I need to get the total number of records for each of the types and then create a variable for each one of the results so for example

wt = 3
spv = 33
shw = 78

and so on..

I have written this code

$tquery = "SELECT equipment, COUNT(id) AS num FROM contract GROUP BY equipment"; 
$tresult = mysql_query($tquery) or die(mysql_error());
while($trow = mysql_fetch_array($tresult)){
echo "There are ". $trow['COUNT(id)'] ." ". $trow['equipment'] ." items.";
echo "<br />";
}

The reason for needing a variable for each type is that I need to work out a percentage value to show this data in a chart, I have written this code and it works fine as long as I have the correct data from the table.

Any help would be awesome thanks

Answer 1

Firstly, where you’re referencing $trow['COUNT(id)'], this is incorrect; it should be coming back to you with the name num (as defined in your SQL query), so you should actually be using $trow['num'].

Now to store your totals:

Create an array to contain your totals. Lets call it $total. Define it as an empty array outside the while loop:

$total = array();

Then inside the loop, assign a new element for the $total array containing the equipment type as the key, and the count as the value:

$total[$trow['equipment']] = $trow['num'];

When the loop is finished, you should then have an array containing all the totals, which you can perform calculations on. PHP provides you with the array_sum() and count() functions (among plenty of other handy functions) which should be enough to get you started with working out averages and percentages.

hope that helps.