Question

Using php 5.3 and mysqli I return a result set from a query that just has usernames, something like

$query_username = "SELECT username FROM some_table WHERE param = 1";
$username =  $mysqliObject->query($query_username);

while($row_username = $username->fetch_object()){
print "<br>Username: $row_username->username";
}

All fine, but here is my problem, there are repeated usernames, and I don’t know which names are going to be in the query before hand, could be bob, sue, james. Or it could be tom, dick, harry, tom. What I need to do is print out each username and how many times it shows up in this object. For very strange reasons I CANNOT use neat stuff like group by and count(*) in the query(don’t ask it is truly weird). So my question is, what is the fastest way to loop through the returned object(or associative array if need be) to get each unique name and how many times it appears. Thanks for your help and I apologize if this is a freshman CS question, I’m self taught and always filling in the gaps!

Answer 1

If you really must do it on the PHP side instead of using a GROUP BY clause:

while($row_username = $username->fetch_object())
{
    if(isset($usernames[$row_username['username']]))
    {
        $usernames[$row_username['username']]++;
    }
    else
    {
        $usernames[$row_username['username']] = 1;
    }
}

asort($usernames);
// use ksort() to sort by username instead of the count

// print out the usernames
foreach($usernames as $username => $count)
{
    echo $username . ", count: " . $count;
}