Advice on cleaner way to write this While statement - php

Question

So the following code works, it is doing everything i want it to do. However, as i step back it seems like an overly convoluted approach to what is arguably one of the most common tasks in php.
I know enough about php to figure out what most things are doing when i see them, and to create some rather ugly code like you will see below; however, the finer points evade me.
I was hoping that if someone had some free time, he/she could look this over and show me a more concise way to approach this.
<?php
$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM events');
$i = 1;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
echo '<div id="item_gallery_s'.$i .'"'. 'class="fluid profileImgWrap goldDiagGrad">' .
'<div class="profile_name">' . $row['name'] . '<br /><span class="profile_date">' .
'<a href="http:#"
target="_blank"
title="some title">' . $row['place'] .
'</a></span></div><!-- DCD Diva Name -->' .
'<a rel="events[events]"
href="#">' .
'<div class="profile_banner">Custom Banner</div><!-- Banner -->' .
'<img src='.'"img/upload/'.$row['icon'].
'"' .
'alt="image description |'.$row['name'].
'"/>' .
'<!-- Photo --></a></div><!-- END #item_gallery_s'.$i .'-->';
$i++;
}?>

Answer 1

The loop itself is fine but you'll find varying opinions on the HTML-in-strings. For the past seven years I've encouraged my team to either use HTML with php tags or we rely on a full templating system:
<?php while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)): ?>
<div><?= $row['something'] ?></div>
<?php endwhile ?>
Though we have short tags enabled for even cleaner code. The benefit of this is that it's cleaner - less quotes, escaping problems, and IDEs will be able to syntax highlight the html. Most treat the html as string when it's inside quotes.

Answer 2

That's as "concise" as it gets.
You could not use an echo inside the while. And use php short tags.
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
?>
<?=$row['place'];?>
<?php
}
?>
Another way to "clean up", would be to use a template engine, but once again that would be just for the HTML part.
{place}
Good coding!

Answer 3

You can clean this up a bit by interspersing actual HTML, rather than simply echoing it:
<?php
$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM events');
$i = 1;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
?>
<div id="item_gallery_s<?php echo $i; ?>" class="fluid profileImgWrap goldDiagGrad">
<div class="profile_name">
<?php echo $row['name']; ?>
<br />
<span class="profile_date"><?php echo $row['place']; ?></span>
</div><!-- DCD Diva Name -->
<a rel="events[events]" href="#"><div class="profile_banner">Custom Banner</div><!-- Banner -->
<img src="img/upload/<?php echo $row['icon']; ?>" alt="image description |<?php echo $row['name']; ?>"/><!-- Photo --></a>
</div><!-- END #item_gallery_s<?php echo $i; ?> -->
<?php
$i++;
}?>
Another option, depending on how much work like this you have to do, would be a full-blown template engine such as Smarty.

Answer 4

Here's how I would probably format this code (as a matter of personal style):
<?php
$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM events');
$i = 1;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
echo
'<div id="item_gallery_s'.$i.'" class="fluid profileImgWrap goldDiagGrad">
<div class="profile_name">' . $row['name'] . '<br /><span class="profile_date">
<a href="http:#" target="_blank" title="some title">' . $row['place'] .
'</a></span>
</div><!-- DCD Diva Name -->
<a rel="events[events]" href="#">
<div class="profile_banner">Custom Banner</div><!-- Banner -->
<img src="img/upload/' . $row['icon']. '"
alt="image description |' . $row['name']. '"/>
<!-- Photo -->
</a>
</div><!-- END #item_gallery_s'.$i .'-->';
$i++;
}
?>
Try also to use consistent indentation to make it easy to tell what matches up with what. By the way, a <div> (block element) inside an <a> (inline element) is bad form. Did you mean to use a <span>? Learn to use the W3C validator to pick up this stuff.