PHP: display entries from Database in groups of five?

Question

Hi,

Is it possible and if so, how can I do it, to select all entries in a table in my database and then display five results at the time in one group.

Meaning: A example is that I've 15 records total in my database, then I want to present my data like this:

<div class="1-5">Record[1], Record[2], Record[3], Record[4], Record[5]</div>

<div class="6-10">Record[6], Record[7], Record[8], Record[9], Record[10]</div>

<div class="11-15">Record[11], Record[12], Record[13], Record[14], Record[15]</div>

I'm not completely sure if I can do it with an SQL statement or I've to write some sort of "do...while" or loop to retrieve each set of data. I've also thought about something with arrays but haven't got up with a result.

Thanks

• Mestika

Answer 1

I find array_chunk() to be pretty useful for this kind of thing.

// pull all the records into an array
$query = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM mytable');
$rows = array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
  $rows[] = $row;
}

// this turns an array into an array of arrays where each sub-array is
// 5 entries from the original
$groups = array_chunk($rows, 5);

// process each group one after the other
$start = 1;
foreach ($groups as $group) {
  $end = $start + 4;

  // $group is a group of 5 rows. process as required
  $content = implode(', ', $group);

  echo <<<END
<div class="$start-$end">$content</div>

END;
  $start += 5;
}

You can of course do this without reading them all in first but if you're going to read them all anyway, it doesn't make much difference and the above version will probably be far more readable than implementing the appropriate break condition(s) as you read the rows from the DB.

Answer 2

Dunno if i understand the question right but if u want to group all the result in groups of 5:

$i =1;    
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
 echo $row['name']."\n";
 if ($i % 5 == 0)
 {
   echo 'hr'; // Or any other separator you want
 }
 $i++;
}