filtering sql statement

irkt

this may seem like a silly question and if it does it'll tell you one thing: i'm a newbie!
anywho; i have a mysql table of articles listing articleID categoryID & articleTXT. my sql statement selects all and returns it in an array.
here's my question; i'd like to display items by category on the page (not just one category that comes on a different page) and show say the last 5 articles per category. is there a way to say show category one and all it's corresponding articles or will i have to write as many sql queries as there are categories?

RickyRak

Being a newbie myself, i've tried something similar to what you are trying.

Check into the WHERE statement in the SQL query. Very helpful. You can do a Select from TABLENAME WHERE CATEGORY=ID or whatever you want to display. Also you can choose to select certain items from the set table. Change the to exactly what you want to select from the table.

I hope this helps. If not, feel free to email me at RFR2@njit.edu. Ill try to help u some more.

TalonFinsky

If you were looking to just return the data from one field of the table, you would specify that field in your select statement. Ie-

"select FIELD from TABLE where FIELD = 'ARGUMENT' "

So in your case, you may use something like:
"select articleid from [your table name] where categoryid = 4"

That will just return the data from the articleid field of any results with the category id of "4".

irkt

thanks for the replies folks.
i guess what i'm after isn't quite clear.
i'd like to pull all the data from the table regardless of category id.
then taking that variable and pulling from it separate variables for each category id. (in a way a second 'query'?)
what i'm basically trying to figure out is to show all categories on one page yet separated individually by category will i have to write multiple queries or can i get away with only one.
here's my original query:

mysql_select_db($database_dbconn_blog, $dbconn_blog);
$query_articles = "SELECT * FROM BlogArticles";
$articles = mysql_query($query_articles, $dbconn_blog) or die(mysql_error());
$row_articles = mysql_fetch_assoc($articles);
$totalRows_articles = mysql_num_rows($articles);

thanks for any help you can provide.
sorry if the original post wasn't clear.