Question

I have this script which produces a 3 column table of results:

$cols = 3;
$row = 0;
$column = 0;
$count = 0;

echo '<table>';
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
   $count++;
   if ($column == 0) {
      echo '<tr>';
   }
   echo "<td>$row['dbField']</td>";
   $column++;
   if ($column >= $cols) {
      $row++;
      echo '</tr>';
      $column = 0;
   }
}
echo '</table>';

This works okay, except if there’s only 1 result, it only prints one cell. I would like it to finish off the row of 3, so in this case, two cells would be empty.

I have the total number of records stored in a session variable $_SESSION['r_count'] and thought it would be fairly simple to add the following snippet after the $column++ part of the above:

if ($count == $_SESSION['r_count'] && $column < $cols) {
    echo '<td></td>';
    $column++;
}

I thought wrong. Could anyone advice me on how to modify this correctly?

Answer 1

If you know the number of rows (i.e. mysql_num_rows()):

for ($i = 0, $n = ceil($nr_of_rows / $cols); $i != $n; ++$i) {
    $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
    if ($i % $cols == 0) { echo '<tr>'; }
    echo '<td>', $row ? htmlspecialchars($row['dbField']) : '', '</td>';
    if (($i + 1) % $cols == 0) { echo '</tr>'; }
}