Question

I have a PHP array that produces four columns per row of a table.
Is there anyway to force an HTML table to display 8 columns per row?

For example if my output is:

<tr>
<td>COL 1</td>
<td>COL 2</td>
<td>COL 3</td>
<td>COL 4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COL 5</td>
<td>COL 6</td>
<td>COL 7</td>
<td>COL 8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COL 9</td>
<td>COL 10</td>
<td>COL 11</td>
<td>COL 12</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>COL 13</td>
<td>COL 14</td>
<td>COL 15</td>
<td>COL 16</td>
</tr>

And the display looks like:

COL 1 COL 2 COL 3 COL 4
COL 5 COL 6 COL 7 COL 8
COL 9 COL 10 COL 11 COL 12
COL 13 COL 14 COL 15 COL 16

Is there anyway CSS or HTMl can force the table to display eight columns on a single line before breaking? So create something like this?

COL 1 COL 2 COL 3 COL 4      COL 5 COL 6 COL 7 COL 8
COL 9 COL 10 COL 11 COL 12   COL 13 COL 14 COL 15 COL 16

Answer 1

Just change your PHP to format it the correct way or use divs and style it accordingly, however if its true tabular data id use tables and fix your PHP to represent what you want.

It really isnt all that difficult in PHP, you could for example just have a counter and when that counter % 2 == 0 then finish the row and start a new one. Increase the counter accordingly.

Pseudo code

Currently you have something like this.

for($i = 0; $i < numRows; $i++) {
    output a <tr> tag

    output <td> tags and data

    output a closing </tr> tag
}

What you need to do is something like this.

for($i = 0; $i < numRows; $i++)  {
    if($i % 2 == 0)
        output startting <tr> tag

    output some <td> tags with data

    if(($i +1) % 2 == 0)
        output closing <tr> tag
}

Alternatley you could just use a boolean flag

is_even_row = ture;
for each row {
    if(is_even_row)
        output start tag

    output data for row

    if(not is_even_row)
        output end tag

    is_even_row = not is_even_row
}