Question

I have following code:

SELECT q21, q21coding  AS Description FROM `tresults_acme` WHERE q21 IS NOT NULL AND q21 <> '' ORDER BY q21coding

It brings back the following (excerpt):

Text                                                     Description
Lack of up to date equal pay cases&legislation - t... Content needs updating
The intranet could contain more "up to date traini... Content needs updating
Poorly set out. It is hard to find things.            Difficulty in navigating/finding content
Only use the intranet as a necessity. Will ask my ... Difficulty in navigating/finding content

Now, I’d like to display this in a table on a PHP page but am having some problems because of the way I’d like it displayed, it needs to be as follows:

Content needs updating
----------------------
[List all the comments relating to this description]

Difficulty in navigating/finding content
----------------------------------------
[List all the comments relating to this description]

and so on.

Now I think it is a For Each loop in PHP but I am having terrible difficulty getting my head around this – any ideas and suggestions very very welcome!

Thanks,

Answer 1

Simple approach

1. Set prev_desc to NULL
2. For each row print text
3. If description is not equal to prev_desc prepend with the description for the new “section” and set prev_desc <- description

E.g.¹ (untested!),

$prev_desc = null;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc(...)) {
    if ($prev_desc != $row['description']) {
        print '<h1>' . $row['description'] . '</h1>';
        $prev_desc = $row['description'];
    }
    print $row['text'] . '<br />'; // Formatting needed
}

Note: You must keep the ORDER BY <description-column> in order to have rows “grouped”. Otherwise this simple approach will not work.

Less presentation-specific approach

I could be considered more “clean” to create some kind of 2D container to “categorize” the extracted data, e.g.,

$items = array(
    'Content needs updating' => array(
        'Lack of ...',
        'The intra...'
    ),
    ...
);

You could then loop over these items like so¹:

foreach ($items as $desc => $texts) {
    print '<h1>' . $desc . '</h1>';
    foreach ($texts as $text) {
        print $text . '<br />';
    }
}

---

¹ As @bobince has noted, make sure that content going directly into the final HTML is properly escaped, see e.g. htmlspecialchars().