Advice on how to build navigation links from db?

[nullifi]

Greetings,

I've been hurting my head for the past day or so trying to figure out how to do this. If anyone could give me any sort of advice to head me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

 

I am trying to build a set of navigation links with sublinks from a db. The output I want would be something like:

DogCatBird

PuppyGarfieldTweety

MaxKittenParrot

 

I was thinking the db would something like:

idtitleurlparent

For the sublinks, and:

id

title

url

For the categories.

 

I was considering grabbing the links via a select "where parent = ##". The place I am stuck at, is figuring out how to actually use this in order to properly output the links. My first thought was perhaps use nested for()'s. An array of an array of an array or something. Perhaps:

$links[$a][$b]['title'] = 'Puppy';

$a would be the id of the header "Dogs", and $b would be a sort for the row containing "Puppy".

 

for($a = 0; $a <= mysql_num_rows($category_query); $a++)
{
echo $category['title'];
// And assorted other html's
  for($b = 0; $b <= mysql_num_rows($sublinks_query); $b++)
  {
echo $category[$a][$b]['title'];
// etc.
  }
}

This seems very, messy, to me. Perhaps its not, what do I know. Is this the way I should be going, or is there a simpler easier, more efficient way I don't know about? Thanks for any input.

[teng84]

can you print your array eg...

echo '<pre>';

print_r($category);

echo '</pre>';