Question

I’m having trouble taking data from a table and using it to replace strings in html text. I need to retrieve the last 4 rows from the table, then using str_replace, automatically create hrefs. So one column is url, one is title, one is description, etc. Then I’ll create 4 separate hrefs from each row. What I have so far will work for only the last result. How do I make it work for all 4?

$query = "SELECT * FROM LINKS ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 4";
if(!$result = mysql_query($query)){
    // query failed, handle the error here...
    $errors[] = "A fatal error occurred and this page is non-functional at this time!";
    trigger_error("Query failed: $query<br /> Due to: " . mysql_error()); // application error
} else {
    // query worked
    if(!mysql_num_rows($result)){
        // no matching rows
        $main_content .= "No rows were found!\n";
    } else {
        // query matched at least one row, use the results from the query here...
        $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
        $title1 .= $row['title'];
        $link1 .= $row['url'];
    }
}
//string replace arrays
$placeholders = array('LINK1','LINK2', 'LINK3','LINK4');
$replacevals = array($link1, $link2, $link3, $link4);

//replace the areas of the template with the posted values
$page = str_replace($placeholders,$replacevals,$template);

I’d like to be able to output $title2, $link2, $title3, etc.

Answer 1

Easiest way to do so would be to do something like this:

...
// query worked
if(!mysql_num_rows($result)){
  // no matching rows
  $main_content .= "No rows were found!\n";
} 
else {
  $urls_array = Array();
  // query matched at least one row, use the results from the query here...
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
  {
    $urls_array[] = "<a href='" . $row['url'] . "'>" . $row['title'] . "</a>";
  }
}

Then you end up with an array of html links set to the $urls_array variable.