php for loop

michaelkirby

Hi,

I want to display 5 items from my database.

This is telling me I should use a for loop as I know how many times I want to loop.

I have a query which gets the data but not sure if i'm constructing the for loop right.

Below is what I have done, can anyone help me out as its only displaying the first result 5 times.

Query:

$query = "select * from brief order by createddate DESC";
$result = @($query, $connection)
or die ("Unable to preform query.br /> $query<br />".mysql_error());

displaying:

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
for($i =0; $i < 5; $i++)

           {?>
                      title : <?php echo $row['title']?> Description <?php echo $row['description']?> <br />
                    i++;

                      <?php } ?>

thanks in advance

big_nerd

michaelkirby,

Please use [php] and [/php] tags to post your code.

Here is a way to loop through ALL results returned:

<?php
$query = "select * from brief order by createddate DESC";
$result = @mysql_query($query, $connection)
or die ("Unable to preform query.br /> $query<br />".mysql_error());

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
?>
title : <?php echo $row['title']?> Description <?php echo $row['description']?> <br />
i++;
<?php
}

If you want to restrict it to 5 results, just add the LIMIT clause to your query

$query = "select * from brief order by createddate DESC LIMIT 5";

Unless you want the entire result to dump to an array and you can play with it as much as you'd like:

$query = "select * from brief order by createddate DESC";
$result = @mysql_query($query, $connection)
or die ("Unable to preform query.br /> $query<br />".mysql_error());

$queryResults = array();

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  $queryResults[] = $row;
}

This will make $queryResults a Multi-Dimensional Array

<?php
  foreach ($queryResults as $res) {
    echo $res['title'].'<br /';
  }
?>

In the above example $res becomes the array of results (1 row from the table).

Note: When using mysql_fetch_array the results are returned 'twice', once in an associative array, once in a numerical (first column 0, second as 1, etc)

I hope this helps..

bradgrafelman

Notice that your problem was that you only called the mysql_fetch_*() function once in your code. Read the manual for [man]mysql_fetch_array/man (including the code examples); the fetch functions retrieve one row at a time, thus you must repeatedly call the function until no further rows exist.

michaelkirby wrote:
I know how many times I want to loop.

Do you? What if there are only 4 rows in the DB that match the query? Or 0 rows? Looping/trying to fetch data 5 times in either case will result in errors.