adding up fields

SureFire

A have a table called submissions, it contains a name field and an author field.

I need a script to go through and find all the AUTHOR fields that are the same and add them up.

So if in my table there are 2 submissions by john, 3 by mark, and 7 by tom, I need a page to post

2
3
7

I need to achieve this with a loop as well.

Thanks for looking!

tomhath

select author, count(*) as numSubmissions
from submissions 
group by author
order by author

SQL is a powerful language, but you'll never be able to guess how to do things. Take a few days to learn the what all you can do with SELECT, UPDATE, WHERE, etc.

SureFire

thank you so much man! Thats just what I've been looking for, I've been dredging through the php manual, for almost a full day and was just selfishly looking for the quick way out! Thanks for helping me get there!🙁

SureFire

Sorry man, but is this anywhere near how to do it? I've omitted the dillimeters and my username and password

mysql_connect(localhost,$username,$password);
@mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database");
$query = "SELECT author, COUNT(*) as numArticles FROM articles GROUP BY author ORDER BY author";
$result=mysql_query($query);

mysql_close();

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

$numberofarticles=mysql_result($result,$i);

echo "<b>$name<hr>$result ";

++$i;
}

or am I way off? where is it that you read about this kind of thing?

tomhath

This is untested:

mysql_connect(localhost,$username,$password); 
@mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database " . mysql_error()); 
$query = "SELECT author, COUNT(*) as numArticles FROM articles GROUP BY author ORDER BY author"; 
$result=mysql_query($query)or die( "Query failed " . mysql_error()); 

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) { 
  echo "<b>" .  $row['author'] . "<hr>" .  $row['numArticles'] . "<br>"; 
}

SureFire

it worked man! Thanks!

trooper

Surefire - i noticed that you said that you had been dredging through a php book for a day.

Like someone suggested in this thread - take time out to read and digest. The reason you didn't find the answer is cause its an SQL issue not a PHP issue.

Taking time out to read / learn / forget and then read again is the best thing you can do - we all had to do it and are in fact still doin it.

Welcome to the wierd and wonderful world of web programming
😃

SureFire

is dredging even a word? I must have been real tired when I wrote that(after dredging all day😃 ).

PHP is alot different than history class, if I cheat on the test for who the 14th president of the united states was, I've only learned just that.

After someone gives me the answer here, I still need to go through and tweak everything to fit what I really needed to do with it. I could have spent a month looking for the COUNT command, but I got it right away so now I'm actually working with the command and learning all about it and what it can be used for instead of looking through tons of material that is more or less useless to me at this point. This is why we have teachers in our schools and not just books...

Now I think I see where you're coming from after reading my first post. it looks like I'm just asking for the whole thing to be done for me. I had everything just about done, I should have posted what I had so far so it didn't look like that...anyway thanks again to everyone here for helping my site get up in a few days and not a month!