Ignoring Null Table Fields

[jmholl5]

Let me start by saying I am very new to php and mysql. I am building a baseball team website and have a table that has class, playername, award1, award2, award3, award4, award5 as fields. The award fields are by default NULL. Each player wins a different amount of awards so I want to ignore fields that are NULL and I can't figure out how to do it. This is what I have right now.

 

<?

include("phpscripts/connect.php");

$query = "SELECT class,playername,award1,award2,award3,award4,award5 FROM playerrecognitions ORDER BY class DESC";

$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

 

while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result )) {

echo "<h3>";

        echo $row['class'];

echo "</h3><h4>";

echo $row['playername'];

echo "</h4><ul>";

echo "<li>";

echo $row['award1'];

echo "</li>";

echo "<li>";

echo $row['award2'];

echo "</li>";

echo "<li>";

echo $row['award3'];

echo "</li>";

echo "<li>";

echo $row['award4'];

echo "</li>";

echo "<li>";

echo $row['award5'];

echo "</li>";

echo "</ul>";}

?>

 

I tried using an if statement but I couldn't make it work. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[btherl]

A better database design is having just three columns:  class, playername, award.

 

Then if you want multiple awards for a player, you add multiple rows to the table.  For example

 

Class  Playername  Award

1      John          Best drinker

1      John          Best sarcasm

2      Bob            Worst BO

 

Then you don't need to worry about nulls because they're not there.

 

If you really do want to keep your current database structure and detect nulls, you can do this:

if ($row['award4'] !== null) {
  echo $row['award4'];
  echo "</li>";
  echo "<li>";
}

[jmholl5]

Thanks. I don't know why I didn't think to design my table that way. Thanks Again.

[redarrow]

why not just add a default expression/number to the database field.