[RESOLVED] 2-dimensional array or not?

ohjay

Hello, I am quite new to php (although I recognize things from learning a tad java for half a semester way back)
and have just written this script that, among other things, pulls data (blog posts) from a mysql table and prints them, LIFO.

I have a for loop that first does a mysql_fetch_array, then this array
is put into another array ($blog). The $blog array is then read backwards in a second for loop.

Now, what I have done works, after much trial and error - but I am thinking there could be a faster/better/easier way of doing this.

So for my learning's sake, if anyone has a better way for me to use next time, it would be appreciated. Thanks!

Here's my take:

<?php
...

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $table") or die('Error, query failed');

$sql2 = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $table"; // used for counting number of rows in sql table
$result2 = mysql_query($sql2);
$num = mysql_result($result2, 0); // $num is the number of rows found in the table

for($i = 0; $i < $num; $i++) {
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result); // makes an array of the first row in the table. Repeat for next row.
$blog[] = $row; // an array $blog that contains the first array. Indexed, starts at 0 and increments.
}

for($i = ($rowsPerPage-1); $i >= 0; $i--) { // prints the contents of the $blog backwards

$post = $blog[$i];

echo($post['field1']);
echo($post['field2']);
echo($post['field3']);
//...etc

...
?>

NogDog

Is there some sort of date/time field in the data table? If so, you could just do a descending sort on it:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $table ORDER BY datetime_field DESC")
          or die('Error, query failed');
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
   echo $row['field1'];
   echo $row['field2'];
}

ohjay

Hm, now that makes a lot of sense :o

There is actually - although it's just a date atm it might be worth it to make a date/time field. I knew there was at least one thing I hadn't thought of :p

But for the heck of it, in theory - if I didn't want to use a date/time field - is there a arraysorting method or something that would be better than my 2d array? I looked at some functions but couldn't see anyone that seemed to do the trick...not that that counts for anything...

Thanks for that NogDog!

NogDog

Well, if you just want to reverse an array, there is a function cleverly called: [man]array_reverse/man. 🙂

Then you could do a simple foreach() on the result to loop through it.

ohjay

Thanks Nogdog - I seem to remember trying out the array_reverse() but couldn't get it to work. I will give it another shot, maybe it was before I got the 2d array to work. Thanks again.