better table formatting from mySQL?

[Anon]

Is there a better way to write this code? What it does is create a {X}x{X} table but I want to create variables to change the number of <td>s and <tr>s depending on the number of results. This example only works properly if the table is 4x4. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance...

<?
//database connection script

$position = "1";
echo ("<table border='1'>");
echo ("<tr>");
$db_ID = "SELECT ID
FROM db_table
LIMIT 16 ";
$db_result_ID = mysql_query($db_ID);
while ($db_output_ID = mysql_fetch_array($db_result_ID))
{
extract($db_output_ID);
if ($position == "1" OR $position == "5" OR $position == "9" OR $position == "13") { echo ("<tr>"); }
echo ("<td>");
echo ("{$position}: {$storyID}");
echo ("</td>");
if ($position == "4" OR $position == "8" OR $position == "12" OR $position == "16") { echo ("</tr>"); }
$position++;
}
echo ("</table>");
?>

[amcgrath]

well, I normally don't have the html within the script (i call it when the logic is finished) so what I do is loop through the result, and put it into an array. When I get the display html, i simply loop through this result set, meaning it doesn't matter if the table is 4x4 or 5x8 or 1x1, it all works the same. Let me know if you need helps still with this.