realy need help building this script please.

[aron]

firstly im not a php coder (im asp) but i can do basic stuff with php and ill most likly undertstand it.

*note the database that im pulling these records from i did not make i have been givin permission to access a particlur part of it.

ok here is what i want to do..
i want to select the collumn (cat_id) from the table (machines)
and list them, but i dont want to show duplicates eg whats happening now is it is showing

1
1
1
2
3
4
4
4

and i want it to show
1
2
3
4

thats the first part now what i want to do with those numbers is instead of printing the numbers i want to print what they are from another table eg 1= cars, 2 = bikes, 3 = trucks, 4 = vans.

the other tabel that list these are (there is 2 i dont know why but there is the first 1 goes from 1 to 99 and the second goes from 100 to 1000 for example.) ok the other tables are categories and categories 2 and the collumns are id (list the numbers) and name(has the actual name).

so now my out put should looklike

cars
bikes
trucks
vans

can anyone please help me with this. it would be greatly appreciated.
aron

[Weedpacket]

Basic SQL.

First part, add the keyword DISTINCT to your query thus: "SELECT DISTINCT...."

Second part, might as well join the two tables. I'll just make up names for some of the tables and fields.

The first table is called categories, and has two fields, id and catname. Maybe some more fields. Looks something like this:

id | catname
---+--------
 1 | trucks
 2 | bikes
...

Second table is called machines. Important is the cat_id field.

Now you want to match catnames from the categories table with the cat_ids in the machines table.

A SQL query which does this would be

SELECT c.catname, m.afield, m.anotherfield FROM categories c, machines m WHERE m.cat_id=c.id (and whatever other conditions apply)

where afield and anotherfield are of course the fields from the machines table you're interested in.