output one instance of a data set that could have multiple occurrences - php

Question

I am having problems sifting through a MySQL query I am trying to strip. I am trying to basically take a column, pull every single entry for that column in a table and then strip it to only show one occurrence even if it happens more than once. So if the value of "bob" shows up more than once I only want it to output once, Everything I have tried either makes it so nothing outputs, or it still outputs ever occurrence of it.
My Code:
$query = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT org FROM accounts");
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {
$holder = array();
$validate = false;
array_push($holder, $row['org']);
for ($i=0; $i <= count($holder); $i++) {
if($holder[$i]!=$row['org']){
$validate = true;
}
}
if ($validate){
?>
<option><?php echo $row['org']?></option>
<?php
}
}

Answer 1

There's a php function called in_array() which lets you search through an array for a specific value without having to write your own loop. So you could replace your entire loop with something like this:
if ( ! in_array( $row['org'], $holder ) )
// your code here
However, your problem is that you're re-initialising the $holder variable to a blank array for every row. You need to store that variable outside the while loop if you wanted to use the above method. For example:
$query = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT org FROM accounts");
$holder = array();
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {
if ( ! in_array( $row['org'], $holder ) ) {
array_push($holder, $row['org']);
?>
<option><?php echo $row['org']?></option>
<?php
}
}
However, you can also select DISTINCT values from a MySQL query, which is probably what you want to do:
$query = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT DISTINCT org FROM accounts");
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {
?>
<option><?php echo $row['org']?></option>
<?php
}