Question

I have a table called answers with 2 rows:

questionid – answer

as you can probably guess questionid stores the question id number and answer stores the answer, the answers are just numbers 1 to 8

I want to display the top answer.

eg:

questionid – answer

4 - 7
4 - 3
4 - 3
2 - 3
6 - 7
7 - 1
9 - 8
1 - 5

top answer = 3

i’ve tried:

SELECT answer FROM answers WHERE questionid='$qid' ORDER BY answer DESC LIMIT 1

and

SELECT DISTINCT answer FROM answers WHERE questionid='$qid' ORDER BY answer DESC LIMIT 1

$qid = page id ie: /question.php?qid=4

but both return incorrect.

Update:

Is there away of showing the result without using:

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
// stuff here
}

as I just want to show 1 result (ie the top answer) based on $qid

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to do this (HAVING(), WHERE, MAX(), etc) The commonality is GROUP BY.

SELECT answer, COUNT(answer) FROM questions GROUP BY answer ORDER BY COUNT(answer) DESC LIMIT 1

This will return:

3 - 3

Read more about GROUP BY.

UPDATE

Seems you modified your question after I posted this answer.

If you want to limit the query to a specific question, add a WHERE clause as the other questions.

... FROM questions WHERE questionid = X GROUP BY ...

Note: Be mindful of SQL Injection.

When you only have 1 record, you can forego the while loop and just access the top result.

$result = mysql_query($sql);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

Note: You’ll like want to do more error checking (e.g. ensure a result was returned). Also, don’t use mysql_* functions as they are now deprecated. Use MySQLi or PDO instead.