Question

I have a table in my mysql database that looks like the following:

    id         |   category  |     title   
     1         |     blue    |     title1
     2         |    green    |     title2
     3         |     red     |     title3
     4         |    purple   |     title4
     5         |     red     |     title5
     1         |     blue    |     title1
     2         |    green    |     title2
     3         |     blue    |     title3
     4         |     blue    |     title4
     5         |     red     |     title5

.....

I want to echo the category names on my page and then count how many items there are in each category.

Goal is something like this:

blue(4)
green(2)
red(3)
purple(1)

I have tried echoing the categories but I just receive a long list of duplicates. Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

No need to mess with associative arrays. You can easily do this in SQL using GROUP BY and COUNT. See the MySQL manual for an example.