Do not repeat string more than once - php

Question

In the database I have various dates stored like so:
ID| Dates
-----------------
1 | 23 April 2014
2 | 24 April 2014
3 | 25 April 2014
4 | 01 May 2014
5 | 02 May 2014
I managed to trim all the digits from the string with PHP which only leaves me with the month titles.
What I am trying to accomplish is to loop the months with a While loop and only show each month only once.
I want to achieve the following:
<h1>April<h1>
<p>23 April 2014</p>
<p>24 April 2014</p>
<p>25 April 2014</p>
<h1>May</h1>
<p>01 May 2014</p>
<p>02 May 2014</p>
So, what I actually want is to dynamically sort the months under its rightful tag
I hope somebody can help
Thank you

Answer 1

If your are query ascending by date, you can achieve your requirement by following example:
<?php
$results = array();// your dataset
$month_name = array(); // empty array
foreach($results as $row){
$this_month = date('M', strtotime($row['date_field']));
if (!in_array($this_month, $month_name)) {
$month_name[] = $this_month;
echo "<h1>{$this_month}</h1>";
}
echo "<p>{$row['date_field']}</p>";
}
I believe there are more better solution can be possible (by change database data field as date instead of keep date as string), but from your current scenario, this solution I think perfect.
******EDIT******
Updated code base on your provided example:
$month_name = array();
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while ($record = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
// $record['date_field'] is your dates field of your database
$this_month = date('M', strtotime($record['date_field']));
if (!in_array($this_month, $month_name)) {
$month_name[] = $this_month;
echo "<h1>{$this_month}</h1>";
}
echo "<li> <a href='dates.php?ID=" . $record['ID'] . "'>";
echo "<p><strong>" . $record['date'] . " | " . $record['timeStart'] . " - " . $record['timeEnd'] . "</strong></p>";
echo "<p>" . $record['place'] . " - " . $record['provincie'] . "</p>";
echo "<p>" . $record['kind'] . "</p>";
echo "</a> </li>";
}