Question

i want to make a website something like popurls.com, but I will use static data stored in MySQL database. Btw I use php/mysql.
In each list i want to show around 10 links (just like on popurls). In that case, if I would have 20 lists, i would need to make 20 ‘for’ loops (for each particular list).
My question is; is there some better way to print that 20 lists instead of using 20 ‘for’ loops in php.

Answer 1

a for loop or a foreach loop will work fine, but it will be a lot less coding if you just create a single for loop and push content into an array of arrays or an array of strings… you can then do whatever you’d like with the actual content (assuming we’re grouping by a column category. I’ll use an example that uses an array of strings (and the query that I reference is explained here: http://explainextended.com/2009/03/06/advanced-row-sampling/)

$query = mysql_query([QUERY THAT GETS ALL ITEMS, BUT LIMITS BY EACH CATEGORY]) or die(mysql_error());
$all_items = array();
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($query)){
   if (!isset($all_items[$row['category']])){ //if it isn't created yet, make it an empty string
       $all_items[$row['category']] = "";
   }
   $all_items[$row['category']] .= "<li><a href='".$row['url']."'>".$row['title]."</a></li>"; //concatinate the new item to this list
}

Now we have an array where the block of HTML for each section is stored in an array keyed by the name of the category. To output each block, just:

echo  $all_items['category name'];