Formatting output table

DanW-MHTN

Being a newbie and trying to learn and do at the same time, I am trying to figure out how to format the display of the tables that my queries generate. Here is generally what I want to do, some of it I understand but the rest I can't find documentation for.
I want the query results displayed in a table with a header row that is dark with white text. The rest of the table I would like to display in alternating rows of two different colors (to make reading it easier).
Could someone please point me in the appropriate direction?
Thanks in advance!

getDizzle

Well, I use style sheets and have a class for "header" and a class for "row1" and "row2" so I have a td.header and a td.row1/row2. I then make a php function that handles this:

function colorSwitch()
{
     static $style;
      if ($style == "row2") {
          $style = "row1";
      } else {
          $style = "row2";
      }       

          return $style;
      }
}

So, INSIDE my actual while or for loop where I'm outputting results where I want to work this I just type:

$rc = colorSwitch();

Then, each row output would look like:

<td class="<? echo $rc ?>"><? echo $result["whatever"] ?></td>

If you don't use style sheets just substitute style with bgcolor. Also, if you don't use style sheets I suggest you learn how cause they are the bomb 🙂

DanW-MHTN

It took me a while but I got it working. Thanks very much!

chaosdivine

Style sheets work wonderfully I agree. However here is some code that alternates table rows of color a variable amount of times(you set the value in a loop).

I have included it here for others reading this thread as I had a similar question once and this is what some people came up with:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Alternating Table Row Colors</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<?php
function usecolor()
{
 //Remember the last color we used
	 static $ColorValue;
 //choose the next value
	 if($ColorValue=="#FFFFFF")
 //if color is white then set the color to grey
  {
  	$ColorValue="#CCCCCC";
  }
      else //if the color is not white, or in otherwords grey, then set the row color to white
  {
   	$ColorValue="#FFFFFF";
  }
 	return($ColorValue);
}
//Creates the HTML table with 20 rows, each time through the loop it calls the usecolor() function
print("<TABLE WIDTH=\"300\">\n");
for ($count=0; $count<=20; $count++)
{
//get color for this row
		$RowColor=useColor();

//print out HTML for row
//set background color
	print("<TR><TD BGCOLOR=\"$RowColor\">");
	print("This is row number $count</TD></TR>\n");
}
print("<TABLE>\n");
?>
</BODY>
</HTML>

I hope this helps someone else.