Question

I’m making a shopping cart for my website.
When an user add something into the cart it should insert item_id and quantity into the items column in my DB.
The item column should hold a string like this:

1:5;6:2;13:1

item_id:quantity;item_id:quantity and so on

The insert part I already got, but when the user wants to view the cart, the string needs to be split into an array and fetch the items from another table

Array example:

1 => 5,
6 => 2,
13 = 1

I’v tried using spliti(“;” $raw);
But didn’t get what I wanted.

And the same thing when the user updates/deletes a product from the cart..
When the user updates/deletes a product, it must search through the string inside items and find the current place of the product.

Any help would be appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

Since you are building your own cart do it correctly using a properly normalized schema. This means that you need to avoid “special” values which do more than 1 thing at the same time.

So the obvious improvement here is to have:

table users:
    id
    ...

table products:
    id
    ...

table cart_items:
    user_id
    product_id
    quantity

CRUD queries will be very simple to implement then and also very fast.