Programming a friend's list, design help appreciated!

[dxdolar]

Trying to figure out the structure of how to design a friend's list type feature. Right now I have ways of going about it (please enlighten me if there are others)

1: user a column, labeled 'friends' in a users table and populate it with a text string of user_id's, i.e.
friends
2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
to update it just add on a new number to the string, to delete it :shrug, I don't know really...haha:

2: use a friend's junction table with individual relationships, my ID and my friend's ID. i. e.
id1 id2
1 | 2
1 | 3

I've been programming with PHP for about 2 weeks now, I've devoured a lot of the basic concepts and now I'm trying to move away from the examples in my book.

Any help in figuring out the design would be appreciate. Plus any guidance on how to execute that design, or links to code I can use as a reference, or tuts, would also be a HUGE help. Thanks everyone!

[j_70]

I think that the problem that you are describing has less to do with PHP and more to do with relational database design. I would suggest that a PHP/MySQL book would be very helpful for you.

Rather than populating a text string of multiple 'friends,' what you are describing is a one-to-many relationship for a relational database structure. This is far easier to deal with than keeping data in a text string.