Question

I have a problem on output the MySQL result to HTML. I had a MySQL result which returns:

| title        | category_name | from_where |
---------------------------------------------
| Title num 1  | Journal       | iidl_file  |
---------------------------------------------
| Title num 2  | Books         | iidl_file  |
---------------------------------------------
| Title num 3  | Announcement  | iidl_post  |
---------------------------------------------
| Title num 4  | News          | iidl_post  |
---------------------------------------------

How can I preview this data in HTML like this:

iidl_file
 - Title num 1 (Journal)
 - Title num 2 (Books)

--------------------------

iid_post
 - Title num 3 (Announcement)
 - Title num 4 (News)

Answer 1

This is what I would do:

SELECT `title`, `category_name`, `etc` FROM `table_name` ORDER BY `from_where`;

If you have many records, you will benefit greatly from making sure there is an index on the from_where column.

Here is some pseudo-code:

$groups = array();
foreach ($rows as $row) {
    $from_where = $row['from_where']
    if (! isset($groups[$from_where])) {
        $groups[$from_where] = array();
    }
    $groups[$from_where][] = $row;
}

Now your $groups will contain arrays keyed by the from_where column.

Doing this, you actually don’t have to even issue the ORDER BY in the query.