Convert Table to Array, then...??

elklabone

Sorry for the dumb question here...

I've done selects a fair amount, but can't seem to wrap my little pea-brain around this one.

Have a small table that looks like this:
|ID|FIRST|LAST|
|1|John|Doe|
|2|Sam|Spade|
|3|Joe|Blow|
|4|Rasmus|Codeguy|

I don't want to do a while loop and spit them all out in a row, I want to load the entire table into an array and then access them later like this:

echo "The first guy is $FIRST[1] LAST[1]. Another guy you might meet is $FIRST[3] $LAST[3]";

Any help would be greatly appreciated...not quite sure how to get mysql_fetch_array to do what I want it to do.

tbach2

AFAIK, you are going to have to use a while loop to get the data out. What you want to do is make your own array while iterating through the data loop.

Since I use phplib to do my extraction from a database, I don't remember how to do it with native php functions-- but I think you'll pick up the idea:

$db->query("select id,first,last from some_table");
while($db->next_record()) {
    // I'll do this the long way to be clear...
    $id    = $db->f('id');
    $first = $db->f('first');
    $last  = $db->f('last');

// make your data structure
$name[$id] = array('first'=>$first,
                   'last' =>$last
                   );
}

// then you can access it like this:

printf("The first guy is %s %s. Another guy you might meet is %s %s.",
       $name[1]['first'],
       $name[1]['last'],
       $name[3]['first'],
       $name[3]['last']
       );

tbach2

actually, you may not want to use id as the way to number the array, 'name'.

It would probably better to use

    $name[] = array('first'=>$first,
                'last' =>$last
                );

Sxooter

Yeah, you're gonna have to iterate over the result sets:

$fields = array("first","last");
$count = db_num_rows($result);
for ($i=0;$i<$count;$i++){
  foreach($fields as $field){
    $array[$i][$field] = db_result($result,$i,$field);
  }
}