explode help

billiondevil

kk at the moment i am trying to code my own rpg styled game and i have hit a problem. i am trying to code shops that can display items accroding to a string of ids. so i might have a string that looks like "56, 9, 12, 23, 34, 17" (each corresponding to the id of the information of an item on another table) and what i want to do with that string is explode into an array. i would like to be able to treat this array like i would do when i have got a mysql query with serveral rows, like this

$sql="SELECT * FROM table";
$result=mysql_query($sql);
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))
{
echo "txt ".$row['id']." text";
}

i have looked around at some explode tutorials and tryed putting some code together with no success, if someone could shed some light on the subject i would be very thankful. if there as any confusment inn what i am asking just ask because it even sounds a bit confusing to me!🙂

bradgrafelman

Out of curiosity, where does this "string of ids" come from? You aren't storing data in your DB like this... are you??

As for using [man]explode/man, it's fairly easy. The only hard part is remember the order of the arguments. The delimiter is simply the character/string that separates what you would like to be different array elements; in this case, it'd be ", " (a comma followed by a space). If you can't get it to work, show us the code you tried.

billiondevil

i was soring it like that in my db to mkae it easy to edit in the admin panel, whats the problem with that?

if i put

while($row = explode(", ", $string) )
{ 
echo "txt ".$row['here']." text"; 
}

what would i put where it says $row['here'] to get it to put the next one in the array in like it would do if i did it with the mysql query while, sry that this is probably a horribly simple question but i have only started coding php!😃

btw thx for the quick reply

bradgrafelman

billiondevil wrote:
i was soring it like that in my db to mkae it easy to edit in the admin panel, whats the problem with that?

The problem is that it creates a single, multi-valued cell in your database. In other words, your database schema doesn't even meet the First Normal Form requirements.

billiondevil

how would you do it then?

bradgrafelman

Well that would really depend on the application and how the data is being used; given your description, my idea for the database schema would be:

Table: items
Fields: item_id, item_name, item_description, (other relevant info?)

Table: shops
Fields: shop_id, shop_name, (other relevant info?)

Table: stock
Fields: shop_id, item_id, quantity

Again, that's just a basic, first-glance outline of a general "shop"-type situation.

billiondevil

what i have at the moment is a item table set out like this

-- Table structure for table `items`

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS items (
id int(250) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'None',
type int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
attribute int(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
cost int(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=4 ;

type and atrribute reffer to the type of item and the atribute will be what the items effect has on an area of the game

and once i know how to do this array thingy the shops table is going to be set out like this

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS shops (
id int(250) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'None',
city int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
items varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
PRIMARY KEY (id)
)

the city int is for a connection to the citys table so i can assign diferant shops for each city and the items varchar is where i am going to put my string of ids for the items.

i have already made the items and the cities work fine, and my aim for the shops is to be able to make shops for diferant cities that will sell differant items, there will be no limit on stock and it will simply be used to make items in a transfer for money, just need to know how to get this array thingy to work like the mysql while thingy that i put in my first post in this thread.

btw thank you very much for answering so quickly.