A good way to display repetitive code

[svivian]

If I want to display, say, data from a database in an HTML table, I'd normally run the query then use a while loop listing a table row and its cells for each tuple returned from the database. But if I wanted to display a similar table (same structure but different data) on a different page, I'd have to repeat code.

 

What is the best way for limiting this duplicate code? At the moment I can think of two ways:

- set up a global function that displays the data and call it on each iteration

- store a HTML/PHP "snippet" in another file and include it on each iteration

 

I'm guessing the include method isn't going to be very fast. Are there any better ways?

[haku]

Either one will work. I would use a function myself.

[QuietWhistler]

You can make a function like this:

 

function createTable( $col_names, $field_names )
{
      print( "<table><tr>" );

      for( $i = 0; $i < sizeof( $col_names ); $i++ )
      {
            print( "<td>" . $col_names[ $i ] . "</td>" );
      }

      print( "</tr>" );

      //mysql query code omitted

      while( $temp = mysql_fetch_array( $result ) )
      {
            print( "<tr>" );
            
            for( $i = 0; $i < sizeof( $field_names ); $i++ )
            {
                  print( "<td>" . $temp[ $field_names[ $i ] ] . "</td>" );
            }

            print( "</tr>" );
        }

        print( "</table>" );
}

 

Then you'd call the function like this:

 

$col_names = array( "column name 1", "column name 2", "column name3" );
$field_names = array( "db_name1", "db_name2", "db_name3" );
createTable( $col_names, $field_names );

 

But you have to be sure that the amount of elements in $col_names is the same as the amount of elements in $field_names

[shocker-z]

I would say create a function with it in kind of like below (untested)

 

function getdata($query) {
  $query=mysql_query($query);
  echo '<table>';
  while($row=mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
    echo 'Your HTML and php variables here';
  }
  echo '</table>';
}

 

Regards

Liam