How to do an HTML 'upward' rowspan - php

Question

Here is the problem:
I need to know if there is a way to do an upward rowspan on a <th> element on a form.
I am reading some rows inside a DB that I need to put inside an html table.
I am doing something like:
echo "<table>";
while($result = $resultSet->fetch())
{
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td>$result['Name']</td>";
echo "<td>$result['Job']</td>";
echo "</tr>";
}
ehco "</table>";
First steps are easy until I needed to 'span' together two adjacent cells that contains the same value.
For exemple if someone have the same name but had two jobs I would like them to have something like :
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td rowspan='2'>$result['Name']</td>";
echo "<td>$result['Job']</td>";
echo "</tr>";
But I can't predict how many jobs someone have (except they all have at least one and that they are all in order).
exemple of record in MySQL table
Name/**/Jobs
Paul/**/Jobs1
Simon/**/Jobs23
Simon/**/Jobs45
Roger/**/Jobs67
(All simon's jobs are 'behind one another', they are grouped. If Paul had a second job it would be the second record in the table 'pushing' simons jobs down).
So I need to change the rowspan value of the first element to fit how many jobs that person have.
This is why I would need to know if it is possible to do a upward span because i could just display every on of them and count how many jobs each person have and do a rowspan that would merge the table cell upward.
It would certainly be easier then fetching every row in the DB then looping throught them all and checking how many jobs a person have to 'span' the cells now and then display them all and then skipping them. and so on.
Thanks

Answer 1

A situation like this calls for pre-processing. Like so:
$people = array();
while($result = $resultSet->fetch())
{
if( !isset($people[$result['Name']])) $people[$result['Name']] = array();
$people[$result['Name']][] = $result['Job'];
}
echo "<table>";
foreach($people as $name=>$jobs)
{
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td rowspan=\"".count($jobs)."\">".$name."</td>";
echo "<td>".array_shift($jobs)."</td>";
echo "</tr>";
foreach( $jobs as $otherjob)
{
echo "<tr><td>".$otherjob."</td></tr>";
}
}
echo "</table>";
Done!

Answer 2

What you're looking for doesn't exist in HTML. But you can do it like this:
$currName = $result['Name'];
echo "<tr>";
if($currName==$prevName)
{
echo "<td> </td>";
}
else
{
echo "<td>$result['Name']</td>";
}
echo "<td>$result['Job']</td>";
echo "</tr>";
$prevName = $currName;

Answer 3

Rather than using rowspan, just nest a table in the second column with all of the jobs for that person.
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td>$result['Name']</td>";
echo "<td>";
echo "<table>"
foreach($jobs as $job): //$jobs holds the job values for the current name
echo "<tr><td>";
echo $job;
echo "</td></tr>";
endforeach;
echo "</table>";
echo "</td>";
echo "</tr>";
Note: you will need to preprocess the result set to get a 2D array for this method (see answer from Niet the Dark Absol).