vote counting help

[fleshbox]

ok, to start out I am quite rusty... I havent written anything in quite some time, so please forgive me if I am missing something very obvious...

I am wantng to set up a simple voting script where the user selects a radio and votes, then it displays what option is currently winning.

I am not concerned with filtering double votes or anything so I am just using a 2 column table, vote_id and vote. I was thinking to use an ENUM for the vote column, but I am unsure of how to tally the votes to display the current winner.

Is there a better way to do this?

[nemonoman]

I assume you're doing a poll with answers like a, b, c or 1,2,3??

if each vote is recorded seperately:
Like
voteid/vote
1/Kerry
2/Bush
3/Bush
4/Nader..etc.

SELECT vote, count(*) FROM vote GROUP BY vote ORDER BY 2 DESC

returns something like:
Bush 20000
Kerry 19999
Nader 2

[fleshbox]

sweet thanks.. I'll give it a try 🙂

[fleshbox]

quick question... how does that return? as an array? I mean how do I access the counts in PHP?

[kemu_]

you should use an alias for it.

SELECT vote, count(*) as votes FROM vote GROUP BY vote ORDER BY 2 DESC

then you can reference it like u reference to any other field...