Question

Is there a way I could get MySQLi to return a multi-dimensional array?

Let’s say I’m selecing blog posts from the database, and each post has multiple tags. With my knowledge, I would do this:

$r = $mysqli->query("SELECT * FROM posts");
while ($post = $r->fetch_assoc()) {
   //echo blog posts
    $t = $mysqli->query("SELECT * FROM blog_tags INNER JOIN tags ON tags.id = blog_tags.tag_id WHERE post_tags.post_id = ".$post['id']);
    while($tag = $t->fetch_assoc()){
        //echo tags
    }
}

But what I’d prefer is doing it like this:

$r = $mysqli->query("SELECT * FROM posts INNER JOIN post_tags ON posts.id = post_tags.post_id INNER JOIN tags ON tags.id = post_tags.tag_id");
while($post = $r->fetch_assoc()){
    //echo post
    foreach($post['tags'] as $tag){
        //echo tags
    }
}

So the return would be:

$posts = array(
    "id" => 1,
    "title" => "Blog post 1",
    "content" => "Lorem ipsum...",
    "tags" => 
        array(
            "tag1", 
            "tag2", 
            "tag3"
        ),
    "posted" => "1-1-2010 11:11:11"
);

Answer 1

You need to use GROUP BY and GROUP_CONCAT. I’m guessing the tag name field is called name

SELECT posts.*, GROUP_CONCAT(tags.name) as tagnames FROM posts
INNER JOIN post_tags ON posts.id = post_tags.post_id
INNER JOIN tags ON tags.id = post_tags.tag_id
GROUP BY posts.id

Then when you get the results, you can explode(",", $t->tagnames) to get an array of tags.