calculate total hrs

newuser666

DB has a field "hours" what code would i use to calculate the total # of hrs?

The db looks something like this

hours
5
5
10
9

how do i get php to give me 29?

Thanks.

stick_figure

The solution lies in SQL. I think you would make your query:
SELECT sum(hours) FROM your_table;

newuser666

I think i need some kind of a while loop but exactly what i dont know.

stick_figure

You could do that, but this is the simple way to let it all lie at the database level so you don't have to do anything. I think that's why they made all of those extensions in the first place, so users wouldn't HAVE to run statistics programs over the result sets. Try the sum() thing, it should work. Does for me in PostgreSQL, and it should be standard.

newuser666

here's my code

<?
$total_hours=mysql_query("Select sum(hours) FROM project_hours WHERE project_id='p'");

echo ("$total_hours");
?>

here's the output

Resource id #13

what am i doing wrong?

stick_figure

I did that once, too. The way DBs work is that you query, and they give a result resource thing. That result set isn't just a string, it's kind of like trying to echo an array, you get Array {. So, it should look like this:

<?php
$result = mysql_query("SELECT sum(hours) FROM project_hours WHERE project_id = 'p'");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$total_hours = $row['sum'];  #The column gets named to sum when you use sum()
echo($total_hours);
?>