Create a Counter in a ranking table - php

Question

I have a table of articles that are arranged by the number of visits, where the most visited one is on top, i.e it has Rank of 1. I tried adding a Rank column in the table, but can't get it to work. The Rank column does not exist in the Database, so this should be an incremental counter that starts with 1 and ends with the number of articles listed in the table.
Here's my code, which does not work
<table class="resultsTable" width="100%">
<tr>
<th style="width:10%">Rank</th>
<th style="width:50%">Post Title</th>
<th style="width:20%">Post Type</th>
<th style="width:20%">Hits</th>
</tr>
<?php foreach($popular_articles as $article) {
//create array for most popular
?>
//set counter variable
$counter = 1;
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
<tr>
echo "<td style="width:10%">".$counter."</td>";
<td style="width:50%"><?php echo $article->art_title; ?></td>
<td style="width:20%"><?php echo $article->art_type; ?></td>
<td style="width:20%"><?php if($article->art_hit_count){ echo '<b>'.$article->art_hit_count.'</b>'; }else { echo '<b>0</b>'; } ?> times.</td>
</tr>
$counter++; //increment counter by 1 on every pass
echo <?php } ?>
</table>

Answer 1

Increasing the counter must be done in PHP. Currently the line that does that is in the HTML:
$counter++; //increment counter by 1 on every pass
I also removed the while, since it didn't seem to do anything, as if it was accidentally pasted there.
The loop should look like this:
<?php
foreach($popular_articles as $article) {
//set counter variable
$counter = 1;
<tr>
<td style="width:10%"><?php echo $counter; ?></td>";
<td style="width:50%"><?php echo $article->art_title; ?></td>
<td style="width:20%"><?php echo $article->art_type; ?></td>
<td style="width:20%"><?php
if($article->art_hit_count){
echo '<b>'.$article->art_hit_count.'</b>';
}else {
echo '<b>0</b>';
} ?> times.</td>
</tr>
<?php
$counter++; //increment counter by 1 on every pass
} ?>
Alternatively, you can display the counter and update it in one go:
<td style="width:10%"><?php echo $counter++; ?></td>";
...
<?php
// $counter++; // You won't be needing this anymore.
} ?>

Answer 2

I think you missed to initialize your counter before the loop (in the commentaries, I can see a $counter = 1, but it's trully executed.
And at the end, you try to increment a variable but you're not in a PHP script, so it can not work. Try my corrected version to see if it work.
<table class="resultsTable" width="100%">
<tr>
<th style="width:10%">Rank</th>
<th style="width:50%">Post Title</th>
<th style="width:20%">Post Type</th>
<th style="width:20%">Hits</th>
</tr>
<?php
$counter = 1;
foreach($popular_articles as $article) {
//create array for most popular
?>
<tr>
<td style="width:10%"> <?php echo $counter; ?></td>;
<td style="width:50%"> <?php echo $article->art_title; ?></td>
<td style="width:20%"> <?php echo $article->art_type; ?></td>
<td style="width:20%">
<?php if($article->art_hit_count){
echo '<b>'.$article->art_hit_count.'</b>';
} else {
echo '<b>0</b>';
} ?> times. </td>
</tr>
<?php
$counter++; //increment counter by 1 on every pass
} //the end of FOR loop ?>
</table>
EDIT
If you want to make a link for the art_title. Just replace this line :
<td style="width:50%"> <?php echo $article->art_title; ?></td>
By this one :
<td style="width:50%"> <?php echo $article->art_title; ?></td>