socialmedia status comment system - php

Question

I am trying to create a post-comment system, with simple php-mysqli, as simple as it is, it does not seem to give me the result in the fashion I want i.e:
---POST MESSAGE----
-----comments-----
Here is the code I used:
<?php
session_start();
include_once('php_includes/db_conx.php');
$user=$_SESSION['user'];
$o =mysqli_query($db_conx, "SELECT post.id,post.post,post.date,post_comments.poster,post_comments.comment,post_comments.date FROM post LEFT JOIN post_comments ON post.id=post_comments.post_id AND post.username='$user' ORDER BY post.date");
while($r=mysqli_fetch_array($o,MYSQLI_ASSOC)){
$status= $r['post'];
$date=$r['date'];
$com=$r['comment'];
$pid=$r['id'];
$poster=$r['poster'];
if(count($pid) > 1){
}
echo $status.'|'.$pid.'|'.$date.'<br>'.$poster.':'.$com.'<hr>';
}
?>
It seems to duplicate the post for each comment for same post.
Not sure am making sense, but i will appreciate an answer.

Answer 1

First, add post id to your query's ORDER BY. That will ensure that your post and all its comments appear together, and only once. (I'd recommend adding post_comments.date as well so your comments will appear in order, but that won't be necessary to get the grouping working.)
... ORDER BY post.date, post.id, post_comments.date
Then keep track of the post id as you go. Echo the post information only when the post id changes.
$id = null; // initialize to null
while ($r = mysqli_fetch_array($o, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
$pid = $r['id'];
$status = $r['post'];
$date = $r['date'];
$com = $r['comment'];
$poster = $r['poster'];
if ($pid !== $id) {
echo $status.'|'.$pid.'|'.$date.'<br>'; // new post, so echo post info here
$id = $pid; // $id becomes new post id
}
if ($com) {
echo $poster.':'.$com.'<br>'; // echo comment if present
}
}
One other thing that will probably cause some trouble is that you have selected both post.date and post_comments.date in your query, so I'm not sure which one will be in $r['date']. It would be a good idea to alias at least one of those columns to disambiguate them.