Displaying data from mysql

pir8

I have two tables created in mysql database as follows:

category: id, name, description
links: id, cat_id, link_name, link

What I am trying to do is display the data as follows in an html table:

category.name
link_name
link_name
* link_name

and so on, depending on how many links there are for each category. Can anyone suggest how can I go about achieving this.

I've tried using two queries, one that selects all info from the category table, and another that selects all info from the link table. After that I setup an outer and an inner loop that will print the category and the links respectively. I didn't get anywhere with it. So if anyone has a simpler way of achieving this, I would appreciate the help.

sarahk

first things first, you've created your tables well which is pretty good if you don't know how to query them.

your basic query is

<?php
$sql = "select name, description, link_name, link from category, links where category.id = links.cat_id order by name, description, link_name";

// pass $sql down to the database
// then loop through the result set

$oldName = "XXXX";
echo "<table>"
while ...
{
  if ($result["name"] != $oldName)
  {
  $oldName = $result["name"];
  echo "<tr><th>" . $oldName . "</th><tr>";
  }
  echo "<tr><td><a href='" . $result["link"] . "'>" . $result["link_name"] . "</a></td></tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
?>

however, do yourself a favour and check out some sql tutorials such as

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp
http://sqlcourse.com/intro.html

pir8

Sarahk,

thank you, I should have known better to formulate my query properly.