[RESOLVED] Combine rows from my mysql and explode them?

duckduckgoose

In mysql, I have a table with a field containing data that looks like this:

1 Morris, Carson, Yuma, Potts
2 Potts, Ng, Taylor, Lawrence, Morris
3 Carson, Yuma, Taylor, Jones, Smith

What I'm trying to do is to retrieve and print out a unique set of names like this:

Morris
Carson
Yuma
Potts
Ng
Taylor
Lawrence
Jones
Smith

I'm not sure how to do this... Help?

laserlight

duckduckgoose wrote:
In mysql, I have a table with a field containing data that looks like this:

1 Morris, Carson, Yuma, Potts
2 Potts, Ng, Taylor, Lawrence, Morris
3 Carson, Yuma, Taylor, Jones, Smith

That is probably the problem. You are using multi-valued fields, and this makes the usual ways of manipulating data in a relational database much more difficult.

I suggest that you read PHPBuilder's article on Database Normalization and Design Techniques.

duckduckgoose

I assumed this task from someone else and it's actually Drupal... Although I don't like the way they've configured their content type in this particular situation, I, unfortunately, don't have the power to change it...

In any event, I tried the following, but it's not working... When I run the query at the mysql prompt, I do get results, so I know the query part of it is fine...

$sql3 = "select field_name_value from content_type_blog";
echo '<div class="clear"></div><h2 class="title">Names</h2>';
if ($result3 = db_query($sql3,$vars3)) {
$arr3 = db_fetch_array($result3);
$list = array();                 

foreach($arr3 AS $row) {        

  $names = $row['field_name_value'];  

  $name = explode(',', $names);  

  foreach($name AS $thisname){ 
    $list[] = trim($thisname);
  }
}

foreach($list as $key => $value) {
echo $value.'<br />';
}
}

duckduckgoose

Ok, nvm... I changed that first foreach loop to a while statement and it's working...