Question

I have a table where I need to get all data, but I need to display the “type” column in a dropdown list. Now in my table it has 2 green, 1 red and 3 white.

id  type_id     type        info1                   info2
1   1           green       some important data     some important data
2   1           green       some important data     some important data
3   2           red         some important data     some important data
4   3           white       some important data     some important data
5   3           white       some important data     some important data
6   3           white       some important data     some important data

I wanted to display this on php like this (don’t worry if the codes are incomplete, I got it :D),

<select>
 <?php
 foreach($result as $r):
 echo '<option>'. $r['type'] . '</option>';
 endforeach;

?>
</select>

The problem with this is that it display all data in column(type), I need to display 1 each type_id. I can’t use GROUP BY because it won’t show infos that I need under that type. How can I achieve this? Thanks!

Answer 1

If you don’t want to run a second query:

<select>
    <?php
        $type=array();
        foreach($result as $r):
            $type[$r['type']] = '<option>'. $r['type'] . '</option>';
        endforeach;
        echo implode("", $type);
    ?>
</select>

If it is ok to run a second query, read Alex Belyaev’s answer.