Question

In my table ‘user_sightings’ I allow multiple entries for each user, so it looks as follows…

------------------------
ID | user_ID | postcode
1     39       ab12cd
2     39       sk91ab
3     39       ab44ix

After running my query I try to print out each postcode with the following…

echo $row["postcode"];

only this only prints out the first instance for that user, Is their a way I can get all instances for the user and dynamically set them as variables?

---

Query:

$sth = $conn->prepare("SELECT * FROM directory, user_sightings WHERE directory.user_active != '' AND directory.ID = :uid AND user_sightings.user_ID = :uid");
$sth->execute(array(':uid' => $UID));

while ($row = $sth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
      echo $row["postcode"];
 }

Answer 1

You need a while loop to fetch the rows, then you can use variable assignment in PHP to assign a variable to each user:

while($row ... {
    ${$row[user_ID]} = $row[postcode];
}

You will need a way to uniquely identify the variables, because then the last instance of that user_ID will be the value of that variable I would recommend using an array. Perhaps something like:

${'user_' . $row[user_ID]}[] = $row[postcode];

This way, $user_39 will become an array containing (ab12cd, sk91ab, ab44ix).

Or you can throw all your data into an array like so:

$user_ID = $row[user_ID];
$array[$user_ID][] = $row[postcode];

Either of those two options would go inside your while loop.

Clarification

If you want to call the postcode for a particular user, first put the data into a multi-dimensional array:

while($row ... {
    $user_ID = $row[user_ID];
    $array[$user_ID][] = $row[postcode];
}

The postcodes will then be stored like so (following example in question):

echo $array[39][0];
//ab12cd

echo $array[39][1];
//sk91ab

echo $array[39][2];
//ab44ix

[39] represents the user_ID