Question

I have a pretty standard database like:

id | name | last_name                | gender 
-----------------------------------------------
1  | John | Doe                      | Male
2  | Jane | Smith Dolores Clayborne  | Female
3  | Paul | Paulson                  | Male

and I want to display it in a table, but every row in the DB needs to be a column in HTML table:

id        | 1         | 2         | 3      
---------------------------------------------
name      | John      | Jane      | Paul
---------------------------------------------
last_name | Doe       | Smith     | Paulson
          |           | Dolores   |
          |           | Clayborne |
---------------------------------------------
gender    | Male      | Female    | Male 

If I go with:

foreach($data as $row) {
echo "<tr><td>" . $row->id . "</td></tr>";
echo "<tr><td>" . $row->name . "</td></tr>";
echo "<tr><td>" . $row->last_name . "</td></tr>";
echo "<tr><td>" . $row->gender . "</td></tr>";
}

I get all the data in one long column. How do I break the column after every SQL row?

Note: $data is an array of objects that contain properties with the field values (you can probably figure that out from the example).

EDIT:

I found the solution, see my answer, it’s simple and elegant.

Answer 1

I figured it out, turns out it’s a pretty simple solution with few cycles and pre-populating an array before writing rows and cells.

I tested it, works like a charm. 😉 It might be useful for someone, so here it is:

foreach($records as $key => $row) {
       foreach($row as $field => $value) { 
           $recNew[$field][] = $value;
       }
}
//This creates a new array composed/transposed with the field names as keys and
//the "rowed" values as sub-arrays.

echo "<table>\n";

foreach ($recNew as $key => $values) // For every field name (id, name, last_name, gender)
{
    echo "<tr>\n"; // start the row
    echo "\t<td>" . $key . "</td>\n" ; // create a table cell with the field name
        foreach ($values as $cell) // for every sub-array iterate through all values
        {
           echo "\t<td>" . $cell . "</td>\n"; // write cells next to each other
        }
    echo "</tr>\n"; // end row

}

echo "</table>";