sort and remove blank

[newatphp]

Hi guys I'm new to php and have been looking round a bunch of sites for help on this but can't seem to find anything so any help would be greatly appricated.

I have a mysql talbe with a colum called cagegories it contains sub categories seperated by > I split them up using the following statement

list($subcat1,$subcat2,$subcat3,$subcat4,$subcat5)= split (">", $catagories, 5);

But now i want to sort subcat3 alphabetically and romove blanks but this has me really stumpped 😕

[Mordecai]

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do. Can you tell a little more, or give an example?

[newatphp]

OK sorry if i didn't explain this well I have a mysql table that I am provided with i cannot modify the table unfortuanely - in the table i have a column called catagories that has fields like this 1

Widget Store > Widget Main Category > Widget Sub Category > Widget

Now i need to sepearte the field so I've been using

list($store,$maincategory,$subcategory,$widget)
= split (">", $catagories, 4);

Now what I want to do is creat a list of Widget Main Categories ($maincategory) that has duplicates and blanks removed.

[trexx]

Looks like poor database-design =)

Anyway, we try to make the best out of the situation since you cannot change the database, as you said:

$categories = Array();

$rs = mysql_query( "SELECT * FROM catgories" );
while( $row = mysql_fetch_row($rs) )
{
	$tmp = split( '>', $row );
	$categories[] = trim( $tmp[1] );
}
$categories = array_unique($categories);

that will work, but i would strongly suggest to setup a proper database.

[newatphp]

Yeah I know I will see what i can do to convince them to reformat the mysql table but in the mean time big time thx for the help man.😃