How to Print single variable in while loop

[golfer]

I currently have a problem where I'm trying to list alot of products with the category heading only being returned once and then the long list of products within that category being listed.

For Example

 

Football boots

Nike

Addidas

Puma

etc

 

Whereas at the moment I'm getting.

Football boots

Nike

Football boots

Addidas

Football boots

Puma

 

My current code for this is as follows.

 

<?php while($row = $db->fetchrow($stuff)) { ?>

<li><a href="store-<?php echo $row['cat_id']; ?>/<?php echo seo_makeSafeURI($row['cat_title']); ?>.html"><strong><?php echo stripslashes(htmlentities($row['cat_title'])); ?></strong></a></li>

 

 

<li><a href="store-<?php echo $row['cat_id']; ?>-<?php echo $row['prod_id']; ?>/<?php echo seo_makeSafeURI($row['prod_title']); ?>.html"><?php echo stripslashes(htmlentities($row['prod_title'])); ?></a></li>

<?php } ?>

 

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

 

[litebearer]

Might look into GROUP BY

[golfer]

I tried Group BY cat_title but this just brought back the category and only one product that was in that category so tried GROUP_BY cat_title, prod_title just brought back the same result as before.

[PFMaBiSmAd]

Think about this, how would a human perform this task? You would 'remember' the current category and only process a category heading when the category name changes.

 

How do computers 'remember' values? They store them in variables. How do computers test if a value changes? They use an if(){} conditional test.

 

$current_category = ''; // initialize to a value that will never exist as data
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
    // test if the category changed
    if($current_category != $row['cat_title']){
        // category changed (or it is the first one detected), output the heading here
       ....
       // remember the current category for the next test
       $current_category = $row['cat_title'];
    }
    // output the product data here
    ....
}

[golfer]

That makes sense thankyou. I am however getting an error from my updated code. For the variable $current_category can you call this anything?

 

<?php

$current_category='cat';

while($row = $db->query($stuff)) {

if($current_category != $row['cat_title']){ ?>

<li><a href="store-<?php echo $row['cat_id']; ?>/<?php echo seo_makeSafeURI($row['cat_title']); ?>.html"><strong><?php echo stripslashes(htmlentities($row['cat_title'])); ?></strong></a></li>

 

<?php  $current_category=$row['cat_title']; ?>

 

<li><a href="store-<?php echo $row['cat_id']; ?>-<?php echo $row['prod_id']; ?>/<?php echo seo_makeSafeURI($row['prod_title']); ?>.html"><?php echo stripslashes(htmlentities($row['prod_title'])); ?></a></li>

<?php }

}?>

[BlueSkyIS]

what is the error?

[golfer]

On my website it just says database query error. But have run the query straight into the database and it works fine. So am unsure of what exactly is wrong with the code.

[BlueSkyIS]

echo the SQL and see what it looks like.

[golfer]

The Sql is fine and does exactly what I need. The error is in the code I have changed to make the title only appear once. I will continue to change things to see what works.

 

Select * from

(products LEFT JOIN categories_products_link ON products.prod_id = categories_products_link.prod_id)

LEFT JOIN categories ON categories_products_link.cat_id = categories.cat_id;

[anselk]

perhaps

 

array_unique($foo);

 

where $foo is the array that you are outputting from your DB.

$new_row = array_unique($row); 

In your case