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Asked: 2026-05-26T22:31:10+00:00

Today is my first day ever messing with PHP or MySQL… I tried to

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Today is my first day ever messing with PHP or MySQL… I tried to make a simple chat program… it works great but it displays the old chats first and the newest chats (which are at the bottom of my table) last (at the bottom of the page).. how can I load the table in reverse order? So it displays the rows front he bottom of the database table at the top of my HTML table?

Here is my code… All in the file called “Chat.php”

<html><head></head><body>
<form action="chat.php" method="post">
Message: <br><textarea type="text" name="message" style="width:80%; height:300px;"></textarea><br>
<input type="submit" />
</form>

<?php

$host="****";
$user="****";
$password="****";

$cxn = mysql_pconnect ($host, $user, $password);

mysql_select_db("defaultdb", $cxn);

if (getenv(HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR)) {
    $ipaddress = getenv(HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR);
} else {
    $ipaddress = getenv(REMOTE_ADDR);
}

$message = $_POST["message"];

mysql_query("INSERT INTO ChatTest (ID, TimeStamp, Message) VALUES ('$ipaddress', NOW(), '$message')");

$data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ChatTest") or die(mysql_error()); 
 Print "<table border cellpadding=3>"; 
 Print "<tr>"; 
 Print "<th>ID:</th><th>TimeStamp:</th><th>Message:</th>";
 while($info = mysql_fetch_array( $data )) { 
 Print "<tr>"; 
    Print " <td>".$info['ID'] . "</td> "; 
    Print " <td>".$info['TimeStamp'] . " </td>";
    Print " <td>".$info['Message'] . "</td></tr>"; 
 } 
 Print "</table>"; 

mysql_close($cxn);


?>
</body></html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What you are looking for is MySQL’s ORDER BY statement. You can use it to tell the DBMS in which order you want your results.

    SELECT * FROM ChatTest
ORDER BY `TimeStamp` DESC

    And just another thing…

    I realize that this is your first attempt, so it’s understandable that there’ll be mistakes. One thing, however, you should learn about right away is SQL Injections.

    Consider an example where the user’s message is

    0'); DROP TABLE ChatTest --

    So suddenly your query would look like 

    INSERT INTO ChatTest (ID, TimeStamp, Message)
VALUES ('$ipaddress', NOW(), '0'); DROP TABLE ChatTest --')

    To prevent this, always run user input through mysql_real_escape_string(), like this:

    $message = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['message']);
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