Question

I’ve created some if / else statements to get name from url like http://website.com/page.php?name=Love It seems to look good and trows no errors, but for some reason I am not getting data from the database. Basically it gets ‘name’ from url and checks of it is one of allowed categories, if yes it selects article from database that has st_category = to what user selected.
But than again for some reason it doesn’t work.

Here is a snippet of code that I think causes the problem.

       <?php
        $category = preg_replace('#[^a-z]#i', '', $_GET["name"]);

        if ($category = "Love") {
        $st_category = "Love";
        }
        else if ($category = "Work") {
        $st_category = "Work";
        }
        else if ($category = "Money") {
        $st_category = "Money";
        }
        else if ($category = "Kids") {
        $st_category = "Kids";
        }
        else if ($category = "Health") {
        $st_category = "Health";
        }
        else if ($category = "Friends") {
        $st_category = "Friends";
        }
        else if ($category = "Education") {
        $st_category = "Education";
        }
        else if ($category = "Other") {
        $st_category = "Other";
        }
        else {
        header("Location: http://www.inelmo.com/");
        exit;
        }

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM stories WHERE showing = 1 AND st_category = '$st_category' ORDER BY st_date DESC LIMIT 10") or die (mysql_error("There was an error in connection"));
        //And another stuff here to display article
?>

Answer 1

That could be tidied up to much less code, much more maintainable, using in_array().

$categories = array(
  'Love',
  'Work',
  'Money',
  'Kids',
  'Health',
  'Friends',
  'Education',
  'Other'
);

$category = preg_replace('#[^a-z]#i', '', $_GET["name"]);

if (!in_array($category, $categories)) {
  header("Location: http://www.inelmo.com/");
  exit;
}

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM stories WHERE showing = 1 AND st_category = '$category' ORDER BY st_date DESC LIMIT 10") or die (mysql_error("There was an error in connection"));

And this also fixes the problem that @matino rightly pointed out, which is that you were assigning and not comparing.