a few questions:

[Anon]

I have a few PHP queries:

1. How did you learn PHP, any good tutorials?

2. Say i use a select statement:

$haha = "SELECT test.ID, test.Name, auth.Name, auth. ID FROM test, auth WHERE test.ID=auth.id";

A very bad example, but anyway. My question is, when creating array and defining variable. How would i define the different test.Name and auth.Name.

EG.

while ($result = mysql_fetch_array($haha)) {
$authorname = $haha["Name"];
$personname = $haha["Name"];

echo("$authorname, $personname");
}

As you can see, i am defining one field for two variables and MySQL wouldn't know which field so how do i say that one is auth.ID and one is test.ID?

3. I am using the tag [PAGEBREAK] to split an article over many pages, how would i do something like this:

[PAGEBREAK title="Title here"] or
[PAGEBREAK]Title here[/PAGEBREAK]

I want to put a title between or in that tag and be able to pull the title from the tag and display it on the page. How could i do this?

Thanks in advance!

[yelvington]

1. The manual. I helps if you have programmed previously in a procedural language such as C.

2. select test.name as dog, auth.name as cat, .... see the mysql manual.

3. Regular expressions. But what you are proposing is to entangle content and presentation, which is not especially a good idea. Why don't you make the pages into separate db records?

[Anon]

1. Mostly through this site and php.net. Php.net has an annotated manual that I've found invaluable. It includes tips and examples for using various functions. PHPBuilder has some excellent articles, providing tutorials on many subjects, but I've found the message boards even more helpful. I found answers to most of my questions/problems by searching the archives, and people have been helpful in answering the few that searching didn't turn up. Browsing the boards also clues me in to tips and tricks I never would have known to ask about.

2. There are a couple of ways to deal with this. My preference is to add aliases to the SQL, e.g. "SELECT test.ID, test.Name as testName, auth.Name as authName, auth. ID FROM test, auth WHERE test.ID=auth.id". Then your associative array has the keys, "testName", "authName", and "ID". No ambiguity.

3. What's a [PAGEBREAK] tag?

[Anon]

Thanx, i don't use seperate records because i find it much harder, making sure ID's are the same, etc.

I find this an easier way.

Do you know how to do it?

[Anon]

[PAGEBREAK] is just a tag that i made up to use.

Here:
if (!isset($page)) $page = 0;
$textarray=explode("[PAGEBREAK]",$text);
$text=$textarray[$page];
echo( "<font size='2'><P>$text</p></font>" );

// NEXT AND PREVIOUS PAGE LINKS
if ($page != 0) {
$prevpage = $page - 1;
echo("<A HREF=\"$PHP_SELF?aid=$aid&page=$prevpage\">".
"Previous Page</A>&nbsp;&nbsp;");}

if ($page < count($textarray) - 1) {
$nextpage = $page + 1;
echo("&nbsp;&nbsp;<A HREF=\"$PHP_SELF?aid=$aid&page=$nextpage\">".
"Next Page</A>");}

That split the pages and then adds next and previous links.

[Anon]

Maybe as an exercise for learning PHP, you could go through the code you posted and figure out exactly what it's doing. It will teach you about coding structures, introduce you to some useful functions, and also give you the answer to question 3.

I should probably add to my answer to question 1. by saying I did C++ before I started PHP, so I could already program and the syntax was a breeze.

[yelvington]

Oh, the data modeling isn't all that hard; you just have a "parentid" property for each chunk, and you search for your children. If there is a child, link to it.

But that may not be the right way to do it. Maybe I'm just being cranky about your approach of embedding pagebreak hints in the content -- you could always strip it out for alternative products.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that the New York Times does its pagination of long stories algorithmically. Or maybe it was being done manually by some of those people they just laid off. :-)

Some sites have quit doing it altogether. Newsweek used to. I remember having a conversation with some of the washingtonpost.com's tech guys about the difficulty of making it work. Now Newsweek is part of MSNBC.com, and I don't see long stories being broken up any more.

[paulsim]

Hello Peter

I know it is a while ago, but did you solve yor problem of the page breaks.

I want to do the same thing. Reports for 30 students on one page, but when printed out each report goes on a separate page.

Any ideas on that.

You the teacher wants to perform only one print operation.

Paul