Question

I have categories currently in my HTML code as follows:

<ul>
    <li>Category 1: ($Count)</li>
    <li>Category 2: ($Count)</li>
    <li>Category 3: ($Count)</li>
</ul>

I want list the count of number of elements each category contain. i could get the count a of category using following SQL syntax:

SELECT COUNT(element) FROM category WHERE cid = 1

However, I don’t know how to bind this up to each category in the HTML code.

I can only think of one other way of implementing this: make the category name dynamic by storing it also in the database, then select all the categories with count.

Answer 1

I think you it will be better if you could store category name in database. If you store Category name in database like

categories
+----+----------------------+
 cid | cat_name                 |
+----+----------------------+
| 1  | Category 1
| 2  | Category 2
| 3  | Category 3
...

Then you could query database like:

$query = "SELECT count(*) as count,`cat_name` FROM categories GROUP BY cid";


<ul>
   <?php foreach($categories as $category) { // Or however you get it ?>
      <li><?php echo htmlentities($category['cat_name']); ?>: (<?php echo $category['count']; ?>)</li>
  <?php } ?>
 </ul>

If you don’t store the Category Name in db, another possibility is that if your cid 1 is same as category 1 and so on then you can do.

$query = "SELECT count(*) as count,`cid` FROM category GROUP BY cid ORDER BY cid ASC"

Provided the $result is in array in order then you can do

<ul>
   <li>Category 1: ($result[0][count])</li>
   <li>Category 2: ($result[1][count])</li>
   <li>Category 3: ($result[2][count])</li>
</ul>

But i recommend you to use first one.

Hope this helps 🙂