Question

I have a table like this

table name: products

+----+-------------+-----------+
| id |    name     |   type    |
|  1 |    apple    |   fruit   | 
|  2 |    banana   |   fruit   | 
|  3 |    tomato   | vegetable | 
|  4 |  egg plant  | vegetable |  
|  5 |    carrot   | vegetable | 
|  6 | Minced Steak|   meat    | 
|  7 |  Pork ribs  |   meat    | 
+----+-------------+-----------+

I want output html like:

<ul>
  <li>apple</li>
  <li>banana</li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>tomato</li>
  <li>egg plant</li>
  <li>carrot</li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>Minced Steak</li>
  <li>Pork ribs</li>
</ul>

I do not know whether there have a easy mysql query. my complex mysql query as below:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM products group by type ORDER BY type");
while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    echo '<ul>';    
        $querys = "select * FROM products WHERE type = ".$data['type']." ";
    $results = mysql_query($querys);
    while($row = mysql_fetch_array($results)){
        echo '<li>'.$row['name'].'</li>';
    }
    echo '</ul>';
}

Obviously this is inefficient, how to improve?

Answer 1

You only need the first query.

$result = mysql_query("SELECT type, name FROM products ORDER BY type");
$grouped_data = array();
while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    $grouped_data[$data['type']][] = $data['name'];
}

Now the $grouped_data gives the result array you will like.

For outputting, it is also simple:

foreach ($grouped_data as $data) {
    echo '<ul><li>' . join('</li><li>', $data) . '</li></ul>';
}