Question

I have a PHP game which uses a MySQL table (history) that keeps track of users and how many times they knew the answer like:

username answer
-------- ------
user1    answer1
user2    answer2
user1    answer3

etc. And I want to use this table to print the best players, so I’m trying to implement an array like

public function getBestPlayers($hrows) /*history_rows*/
{
$ray=array();
$hlen = count($hrows);

for($i=0;$i<$hlen;$i++)
{
    $curnick = $hrows[$i]['knower'];
    $ray[$curnick]; //my attempt to "set" the index
    if($ray[$curnick]!=NULL)
    {
        $ray[$curnick]++;
    }
    else
    {
        $ray[$curnick]=1;
    }
}//for
$ray = sort($ray);
return $ray;
}//getBestPlayers()

so that in the end I have $ray['user1'] = 2 , $ray['user2'] = 1 etc.
But this gives error “undefined index: user1”.
what should I do?
thanks in advance..

Answer 1

You should let MySql do this for you, which will be much faster and much easier:

SELECT username, COUNT(*) AS score FROM tbl GROUP BY username ORDER BY score DESC

This will return a result set of the form

username score
-------- ------
user1    2
user2    1