Question

Quick question, which I think has a very easy solution for someone who has anything above the most rudimentary knowledge of PHP/MySQL as I do.

I have a list of cities in a variety of states stored in a database with city, state and some other variables. Right now they get pulled as a list sorted by city name:

• Anchorage, AK
• Baltimore, MD
• Chicago, IL
  etc etc.

I want to be able to group by state first, then list all the cities that have that state value. So it’d look like:

AK

• Anchorage
• Juneau

CA

• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• etc etc

I know I need to do some sort of foreach and have searched online, but haven’t found an example that I can get to work.

Here’s what I have to pull the basic list:

  $list = mysql_query("SELECT id, alphaname, state FROM regional ORDER BY alphaname",$db);

while ($thearray = mysql_fetch_array($list)) {
  echo "<li><a href='info.html?id=$thearray[id]'>$thearray[alphaname], $thearray[state]</a></li>";
  } 

The only real way I know how to do it would be to run a query for each state which would be a pain and totally stupid…

Thanks for any help!

Update – solved. I went with rockacola’s approach though i-g’s worked as well.

Answer 1

Try this..

Query all city with state, order by state first then by city:

SELECT id, alphaname, state 
FROM regional 
ORDER BY state ASC, alphaname ASC

Organise your dataset into 2 dimension array:

$states = array();
while($thearray = mysql_fetch_array($list)) 
{
    $states[$thearray[state]][$thearray[id]] = $thearray[alphaname];
} 

Now contents of your $states should look something like:

Array
(
    [AK] => Array (
        [id_1] = Anchorage
        [id_2] = Juneau
    )
    [CA] => Array (
        [id_3] = Los Angeles
        [id_4] = San Diego
        [id_5] = San Francisco
    )
)

Generate your HTML presentation:

NOTE: Add anchor to reflect proposed question.

foreach($states as $state_name => $cities)
{
    echo '<h3>'.$state_name.'</h3>';
    echo '<ul>';
    foreach($cities as $id => $city_name)
    {
        echo '<li><a href="info.html?id='.$id.'">'.$city_name.'</a></li>';
    }
    echo '</ul>';
}