Help with enumerating values

mpociask

Hello All!

I am pulling a bunch of records from a MySQL database. Can you help me enumerate how many times a given value appears, for example:

id........name
=........====
1........Jack
2........Tim
3........Jack
4........Chris
5........Jack
6........Tim

I need:

Jack => 3
Tim => 2
Chris => 1

What is the best way? I am new to PHP so any code would help a ton!! Thanks!

bradgrafelman

Well... are you doing something else with the data, or are you just trying to count the number of times they appear? If you're not using the data, you can simply have MySQL do all the counting for you, i.e.

$query = 'SELECT COUNT(id) as Number WHERE `name` = \'Jack\'';
$exec = mysql_query($query);

$number_of_times = mysql_result($exec, 0);

OR if you ARE using the data, and what to count the number of times they appear in addition, I would do something like this:

$theArray = array(
	1 => 'Jack',
	2 => 'Tim',
	3 => 'Jack',
	4 => 'Chris');

$number = count(array_keys($theArray, 'Jack'));

echo $number; // prints "2"

mpociask

bradgrafelman wrote:
OR if you ARE using the data, and what to count the number of times they appear in addition, I would do something like this:
$theArray = array(
	1 => 'Jack',
	2 => 'Tim',
	3 => 'Jack',
	4 => 'Chris');

$number = count(array_keys($theArray, 'Jack'));

echo $number; // prints "2"

I will be using the data. How do I extract the unique values. my output needs to look like this:

Jack (Number of times jack appears)
Tim (Number of times tim appears)
Chris (number of times chris appears)

If Donny is no where in the results at all, I don't want it to say:

Donny 0

Also, I don't want the names (Jack, Tim, Chris, Donny) hard coded any where in the script because this function should handle ANY values, not ones that the code is expecting.

laserlight

You are looking to use this SQL statement:

SELECT name, COUNT(name) FROM tablename GROUP BY name;