counting the number of records

Lcousins

How simple should this be!!

I have a table containing information, and each bit of information belongs to a catagory which is named using the imaginativley named field 'catagory'. All I want to do is count up how many bits of information a belong to each catagory and display the results as a simple list eg:

igloo plans: 23
moose blueprints: 34
pudding: 44
tulips: 22

etc etc.

the way I am currently doing it is calling up all records and within a " while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){ " I am sticking lots of " if " statements which add 1 to a variable being used as a counter . It works but its long and messy and I rememebr reading a much simpler way of doing it, simply cant remember how and am having an off day with the search engines...

any advice much appreciated :p

Pig

Check out COUNT and GROUP BY in the mysql manual.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/index.html

Lcousins

Hi there,

yeah, thanks for the link, I've seen that but I don't know how to output the results in my php page, I guess you could say I can use mysql and php to a limited extent seperately but I'm not comfortable in knowing how to combine the two beyond simple select, delete and update commands.