While Loop

[jonathen]

Hi all,

Having a problem here. I have a table that lists records, and one of the columns is called "Category". I have on my index page a listing of categories the user can click on to view all listing in that category. To save me having to type out links for every category, I have the following loop in place, which checks column "category" for the names of the categories, and prints them out with a link to that category page.

This works fine, and loops the <li> tags and adds the links nicely. However, what I did not bank on, is that it calls ALL cells within the db that have a category name in, so if there are duplicates (i.e I put three entries into the db under category "Linux") then I get:

Linux
Linux
Linux

...amongst my other categories 🙁

Any ideas of how I can get the script to list the unique category names once and loop with links? This is my current code:

$i=0;
while ($i < $num) {

$category=mysql_result($result,$i,"category");

echo "<li>";
echo "<a href=\"$category.php\">$category</a>";

++$i;
}

[cgraz]

Not sure if I understood correctly, but you want to select each category only once?

SELECT DISTINCT category FROM your_table

DISTINCT will make sure it only returns Linux (and other categories) once.

Cgraz

[dustin]

Try something like this... will make an array of seen categories. if the category hasn't been seen, it outputs the html.

$i=0;

while ($i < $num) {
	$category=mysql_result($result,$i,"category");
	if(!$exists[$category]) {
		$exists[$category] = 1;
		echo "<li>";
		echo "<a href=\"$category.php\">$category</a>";
	}
	++$i;
}

[jonathen]

Thank you both so much! The DISTINCT select does the job perfectly 🙂