Building hierarchy with PHP

[otnb-injad]

I am trying to build a parent child hierarchy from a mysql table and am looking for an effiecient way to dynamically do this.

What I have is a table with two fields [name] and [parent].

The [name] field is unique. The [parent] column for each [name] refers to what object the name falls under.

Example Table:
[NAME] [PARENT]
1

2 1
3 1
4 2
5 2

This table would build a hierarchy like:
EX:

1 - Top Level
2 - Parent is 1
4 - Parent is 2
5 - Parent is 2

3 - Parent is 1

I would like to display a "hierarchy" on the web dynamically from the database.

hope this make sense.

thanks

[superwormy]

Write a recursive function, which walks down the heirarchy tree.

Something like this...

function Category_Tree ($category_ID) {

if ($category_ID) {

	$category_result = DB_query ("SELECT ID, container_ID, title FROM category WHERE ID = " . $category_ID);
	$category_array = DB_array ($category_result);

	$GLOBALS['build'] = $GLOBALS['build'] . $category_array['title'] . ", ";

	Category_Tree ($category_array['container_ID']);

}

}

Note how the function calls itself, and walks down the tree to build a little string... hope that makes sense, its kinda snippet out of some random chunk of my code...