Listing multiple records under one field name

new7media

I have a MySQL table set up with the following fields (example):

ID
Organization_Name
Issue_Area

I want to list out the organization names so that these show under the issue area that the organization manages. Using a simple call to the database and a while loop and then echo-ing the data to the screen, I can get the data to show up like so (example data):

ISSUE AREA: ORG NAME

Demilitarization: No More War, Inc.
Housing: Habitat for Humanity
Housing: The Home Coalition
Hunger: Kansas City Food Bank
Hunger: Wisconsin Food Pantry

What I want to do is show the data like so:

Demilitarization:
* No More War, Inc.

Housing:
Habitat for Humanity
The Home Coalition

Hunger:
Kansas City Food Bank
Wisconsin Food Pantry

Is this a good place to use a FOR loop? How would I set it up? Any help is MUCH APPRECIATED!

Phantazm

Although there are several ways to do this, here's the first that came to mind...

Here's an example

    $ia="";
    while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($result))
    {
      $old_ia=$ia;
      $ia = $data['IssueArea'];
      $on = $data['OrgName'];
      if ($old_ia!=$ia) // Only Print Issue Area if it is different from the last time in the loop
      {
        echo "Issue Area: $ia<br>\n";
      }
      echo "$on";
    }

What the above script does is simply keep up with what the last value of $ia was, and only prints $ia if it is different from the last time around the while loop.

-=edit=-

Almost forgot... in order for this particular method to work, you will need to use "order by issue_area" as part of your sql query. If you do not and have non-sequencial occurences of a given issue area, it will still print the mutliple occurences that are not adjacent to each other in the database.

acidbox

ack... accidently hit post lol

new7media

THANK YOU. Worked beautifully on the first try. Phew! Really appreciate the help!