Split records into two columns

Question

I have a "student" table, having around 5,000 records, in my DB. I want to display those records in two divs. How do I do that without executing the query twice; only using a single query?

Answer 1

Maybe split the array into two then implode them and then print both halves on each div.

Answer 2

Just find where the "middle" is and output the end tag of the div tag and the start tag of the second div:

<? 
$rowcount = mysql_num_rows($recordset);
echo "<div id='div1'>";
$i = 0;
while ($d = mysql_fetch_object($recordset)) {
  echo $d->somefield;
  $i++;

  if ($i == floor($rowcount / 2)) {
      //we have reached the mid-point, let's close the first DIV
      echo "</div><div id='div2'>";
  }
}
echo "</div>";
?>

Answer 3

   try something like this
// connection goes there
$q = "SELECT `name` FROM students";
$result = mysql_query($q);
$students = array();
while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
       $students[] = $row['name'];
}
$students_count = sizeof($students);
// chunkes into a two parts , want more columns ? just change "2" to other number
$students_chuncked =  array_chunk($students,ceil($students_count/2),true); 

//now display
foreach ($students_chuncked as $student_div_data){
   echo '<div>',explode($student_div_data,'<br/>'),'</div>';
}

Answer 4

Just use CSS3. Not sure how widely it is supported but saves a lot of headache and is a lot more powerful when making changes.

Use column-count, and column-width to control the number of columns and width of each column. Here's some sample code and some pretty impressive results. Prefix -webkit and -moz for now until its standardized across all browsers.

.multi-column {
    /* Standard */
    column-count: 2;
    column-width: 150px;
    /* Webkit-based */
    -webkit-column-count: 2;
    -webkit-column-width: 150px;
    /* Gecko-based */
    -moz-column-count: 2;
    -moz-column-width: 150px;
}

Applied to this <div>

<div class="multi-column">
    Ethelred of Wessex
    Louis XII of France
    George Frideric Handel
    George Washington
    Charles Deslandes
    Andrew Jackson
    Alfred Vail 
    William McKinley
    Woodrow Wilson
    Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud
    Fidel Castro
    Charles de Gaulle
    Leonardo da Vinci
</div>

Don't you wanna see how it looks like after all this hard work?

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But what if there were 3 columns? No problem.

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But there's no way it can handle 4 columns you'd say:

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Enough! I gotta stop adding these now

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God please make it STOP!!

Answer 5

I prefer to minimize any early use of "echo", because tomorrow you will want to move this in a function or a method, where "echo" should be avoided. Moreover, with the "echo" in the loop you've lost the array structure inherent to databases, and you need this structure to manipulate your data. So I would rather fill an array, process it, then implode to output.

And I would use styled bullet points to display the items, because you apparently want to display a list of items. In pseudo php code:

while row = fetch(sql)
  lines[] = "<li>row_data</li>"
end

// work on the lines array, eg insert "</ul><ul>" in the middle
echo "<ul>".implode("\n",lines)."</ul>"

Answer 6

My implementation:

<?php
$students = array(1,2,3,4,5);
$split = floor(count($students)/2);

echo '<div id="parent"><div id="col-1">';

$i = 0;
foreach($students as $student)
{
  echo 'Student #' . $student . '<br />';
  if($i == $split)
  {
    echo '</div><div id="col-2">';
  }
  $i++;
}

echo '</div></div>';

Using the CSS3 Webkit/Moz only features are in my opinion very bad practice.

Answer 7

My Problem fixed