Leaderboard

wildcard characters % and _ are only used with a LIKE comparison in a query. if your first query produces any result, it means that you managed to store the % characters in with the data in the database table. preg_match() is a php function. you cannot put it a query to match data in the database table. this query would be producing an sql error. are you using exceptions for errors for the sql queries (this is the default setting now in php8+)? MySql does have regular expressions. see this link - https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/regexp.html the regex pattern you came up with matches a string with exactly 3 decimal digits. your stated example is to match 2 digits. which is it and can it vary? what exactly is the overall top-level task you are trying to accomplish, because using regex pattern matching is slow and cannot use indexes, so is a poor choice when you have large amounts of data? lastly, do NOT put dynamic data values directly into sql queries, where any sql special character in a value can break the sql query syntax. use a prepared query instead. if it seems like using the mysqli extension is overly complicated and inconsistent, especially when dealing with prepared queries, it is. this would be a good time to switch to the much simpler and better designed PDO extension.

I'm guessing the assignment deadline has passed, so for the sake of others reading the thread, here's one solution... <?php $a = 1; $b = 2; $c = []; $d = []; $N = 8; $tdata1 = $tdata2 = ""; $vals = []; for ($i=1, $a=1, $b=2; $i<=$N; $i++, $a+=2, $b+=2) { $c[] = $a; $d[] = $b; $exp = '<u>' . join('.', $c) . "</u><br>" . join('.', $d); $tdata1 .= "<td>$exp</td>"; $val = number_format(array_product($c) / array_product($d), 5) ; $tdata2 .= "<td>$val</td>"; } ?> <table border='1'> <tr><th>Fraction</th> <?=$tdata1?> </tr> <tr><th>Decimal</th> <?=$tdata2?> </tr> </table>