[RESOLVED] Exempting an empty field from an array

[blackbeard]

Basically I have combined two user databases for two seperate areas of my website. One section requires a department field, the other does not. My problem is the Administrator account I created for one area of the site has no department (on purpose) and it shows up as a blank link when it is displaying all the departments from the array. I am curious as how to exempt that blank department so it does not show. Note: In Firefox it displays fine, but in IE it shows the blank space as a clickable link. It's kind of a sticky situation; I apologize if you do not understand what I am asking.

if ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
	$departments = array();
	do {
		if ((!in_array($myrow["department"], $departments))) {
			$departments[] = $myrow["department"];
		}
	} while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result));
}

foreach($departments as $department) {
	$departmentdec = rawurlencode($department);
	echo "<tr><td width=140><a href=directory_main.php?department=".$departmentdec." target=mainFrame class=menulink class=&{ns4class};>".$department."</a></td>";
}

[laserlight]

From the looks of it, you can tailor your SQL statement such that you dont need to check $departments for duplicate entries. After that, the actual printing of the department just needs a check to print a space if there is a blank (but not NULL in the database) department (e.g. an empty string).

$departments = array();
$query = "SELECT DISTINCT(department) FROM tablename";
if ($result = mysql_query($query)) {
	while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
		$departments[] = $row['department'];
	}
}

foreach ($departments as $department) {
	echo '<tr><td width="140">';
	if ($department !== '') {
		echo '<a href="directory_main.php?department=' . rawurlencode($department)
			. '" target="mainFrame" class="menulink">' . $department . '</a>';
	} else {
		echo '&nbsp;';
	}
	echo '</td>';
}

Of course, if you dont actually need the $departments array, you might even do the printing in the same loop that you extract from the result set.

[blackbeard]

Ya I created the array because if two people have the same department it, it would print twice so I had to get rid of the duplicates. Thanks for your help.