Question

I’m trying to do a simple search query in php with:

SELECT * FROM `books` NATURAL JOIN `authors` WHERE `books`.`title` LIKE '%$search%

In the returned result I expect the same book title to have more then one author. I would like to display the title just once with multiple authors, and can’t seem to find an elegant solution to print the wanted values without doing at least 2 loops with multiple counters like so:

    $last = ""; $i = 0;
while ($row = $result->fetchRow(MDB2_FETCHMODE_ASSOC)) {
    $current = $row['title'];
    if ($current != $last) {
        $i += 1;
        $books[$i]['title'] = $current;
        $books[$i]['author'][] = $row['author'];
        $books[$i]['pages'] = $row['pages'];
    } else {
        $books[$i]['author'][] = $row['author'];
    }
    $last = $current;
}

foreach ($books as $book) {
    $return_result .= 'Title:  '  . $book['title']  . '<br />';
    foreach ($book['author'] as $author) {
        $return_result .= 'Author: '  . $author . '<br />';
    }
    $return_result .= 'Pages:  '  . $book['pages']  . '<br />';  
    $return_result .= '<br />';
}

Please tell me if there’s a better way to do this, maybe in MySQL ?

Answer 1

The GROUP_CONCAT function will give a delimited list of authors.

SELECT b.title, b.pages, GROUP_CONCAT(a.author)
    FROM books b
        NATURAL JOIN authors a
    WHERE b.title like '%$search%'
    GROUP BY b.title, b.pages;