How to Alphabetically Order Results in 3 Columns

fireineyes

I am a newbie to php (but I am learning) and I have seen this done on sites I know is in php and really would like to do this myself. How do I take a list of results and order them alphabetically and split them into 3 equal columns?

For instance in the database...

State

AL
CA
CO
DE
FL
GA
KA
MA
ME
MS
TN

I want three columns in the html output of the php....

AL     FL       ME
CA     GA       MS
CO     KA       TN
DE     MA

I understand how to make the 3 column table for the html so that is not necessary. I just need to know how to put the results in alphabetical order and split the results into maybe 34% - first row; 34% - 2nd row; and the rest (32%) (or just 33.3% even I don't know... ) Can anyone help me on this?

barand

//Store your states in an array, $states, and count them

$n = 0;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query_result)) {
    $states[] = $row['state'];
    $n++;
}

// sort the array

sort ($states);

//if you want the 3 cols, div_point is number in each column

$div_point = floor(($n+2)/3);


for ($i=0; $i<$div_point; $i++) { 
    echo "<tr><td>$array[$i]</td>";
    echo "<td>$array[$i + $div_point]</td>";
    echo ""<td>$array[$i + $div_point * 2]</td></tr>" ;
}

So in your example of 11 states, div_point = 4 and the for loop puts
elements 0, 4, 8 in first row
1, 5, 9 in next row
2, 6, 10 in next row
3, 7, _ in last row

hth