incrementing variables names indefinatley

[paul2463]

Hi Guys

probably a really silly stupid question but here goes anyway, I have a tabel of group names for multy mail groups sending type stuff, the table only holds the id and then the name of the group(ie. id1 = groupd aministrators id2 = carpet sweepers etc etc)

now I will not know how many groups will be set up in the future on the system and I want to pull all the names from the database but assign them an incremented variable here is what I am doing at the moment

[code]
<?php
$query1 = "SELECT groupName from messageGroups";
$result = mysql_query($query)or die ('Error in query: $query. ' . mysql_error());
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
//in here I want to asign $name1 to the first row and $name2 to the second and so on untill the end
}
?>
[/code]

for some reason I am not figuring it out in my head to make it work, when I try and append a value to end of the variable name it becomes its value not its name. any help gratefully recieved

Paul

[HuggieBear]

Why not put them into an array then?  The array is keyed on number by default.

[code]<?php
// Prepare SQL
$query = "SELECT groupName from messageGroups";

// Execute query
$result = mysql_query($query) or die ('Error in query: $query. ' . mysql_error());

// Put each row into an array, keyed on number (starting from 1, not 0)
$key = 1
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
  $groups[$key] = $row['groupName'];
  $key++;
}
?>[/code]

This also gives you the added advantage of being able to find out how many groups there are by using the count() function

[code]<?php
$number_of_groups = count($groups);
?>[/code]

Also, doing something to each of the groups in turn is as simple as a foreach loop

[code]<?php
foreach ($groups as $key => $name){
  // Change to first letter of the group to upper case and the rest to lower
  $groups[$key] = ucfirst(strtolower($name))
}
?>[/code]

Regards
Huggie

[ToonMariner]

Assigning your data to an array is more useful but what you asked for in teh first post is the old variable variable routine..

[code]
<?php
$query1 = "SELECT groupName from messageGroups";
$result = mysql_query($query)or die ('Error in query: $query. ' . mysql_error());
$temp = "name$i";
$i = 1;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
$$temp = $row;
$i++;
}
?>
[/code]

then you can traverse these using

[code]
<?php
$i = 1
do
{
echo $$temp;
$i++;
} while (isset($$temp));
?>
[/code]