Php search function displaying null - php

Question

Hi guys so i am just using learning php for the first time and building my own site etc to try it out. I have a database of recipes. For each recipe it has a list of ingredients. Each recipe will have different amounts. So one will have 5, the other can have 3 etc. The problem with my code is. If someone searches for a recipe and they find it, it will return the ingredients but sometimes if it has more than the divs i put there it will give some null values back. Also i understand about the sql injections etc and the bad practice but i am just playing about with it first. I want to get it to work and then fix that part later :)
PHP:
<div class="panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-heading"><b>' . htmlentities($rN, ENT_QUOTES) . '</b></div>
</a>
}
?>
Now i am pretty sure in my white loop i am suppose to do an if statement after the div tags and say if the value == null then dont display but i have tried and nothing has worked so any help on this matter would be great
Thanks

Answer 1

Your HTML for ingredients seems be repeating, so you can resolve the empty <div> issue and short your code using a for loop and a if condition:
$output .= '<div class="panel panel-default">
(...)
<h3 class="media-heading">INGREDIENTS:</h3>';
for( $i=1; $i < 7; $i++ )
{
if( ${"rI$i"} )
{
$output .= '<div class="food-graph">
<span class="food-graph-title">' . htmlentities(${"rI$i"}, ENT_QUOTES) . '</span>
</div>';
}
}
$output .= ' (...) ';

Answer 2

If encountering null values is a problem, this will only print out the ingredients that your row contains.
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
$rN = $row['recipeName'];
$i=1;
$recipes = '';
if (isset($row['recipe_ing'.$i]) {
while(isset($row['recipe_ing'.$i]) {
$value = htmlentities($row['recipe_ing'.$i], ENT_QUOTES);
$recipes .= <<< EOT
<div class="food-graph">
<span class="food-graph-title">$value</span>
</div>
EOT;
$i++;
}
$output .= <<< EOT
<div class="panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-heading"><b>' . htmlentities($rN, ENT_QUOTES) . '</b></div>
<div class="panel-body">
<div class="pull-left col-xs-12 col-sm-4">
<a href="#">
<img class="img-thumbnail img-responsive" src="Image/green.jpg">
</a>
<a class="btn btn-success btn-block btnrec" href="#">View Recipe</a>
</div>
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-6 col-md-6">
<div class="media-body">
<h3 class="media-heading">INGREDIENTS:</h3>
$recipes
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="panel-footer">Rating</div>
</div>
EOT;
}
}
EDIT: Also, i'm using Heredocs to set the strings. the lines with EOT; must have no whitespace or code in front of it. it must be at the start of the line. also no code may be on the same line behind it. Else, your documents will become a huge string.