Returning more than one row from a result set

[hjwilliams]

I've executed a query that returns results such as:

state city

ID A
ID B
CO C
MS D
MS E
MS F

I'd like to process the results by state. So for instance if I had an array of just the first state:

state city

ID A
ID B

Then I could iterate through this array and process appropriately. I'd then want the next state array: [state]=> CO, [city] =-> C, and so on.

What I'm struggling with is how to return more than one record from a result set at a time, specifically to group them by state. I know I can use $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) to give me one row. But is there an easy way to return a subset of my result array as another smaller array based on the value of a variable such as state?

All suggestions are appreciated.

[lazzerous]

if you're going to be working with all of the data, pull it all for the database, and loop through the results to generate a multi-dim array

that way, you can play with the array all you want without necessitating additional db calls