Count and display entries with a database - php

Question

I have menu that displays entries using php and mysql. What I'm trying to do is to get a list of products that equal clothing for example then shoes and so on. Theirs about 4 main types, this value can't be changed.
So:
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM products WHERE type = 'Clothing'")or die(mysql_error());
Instead of looping through I'll just repeat the process 4 times.
After this I want to display each main category and sub category for each type of clothing with the products table, so that it displays like this.
Clothing
Main Category 1
(1)Sub 1
(35)Sub 2
(4)Sub 3
Main Category 2
(1)Sub 1
(35)Sub 2
(4)Sub 3
Shoes
Main Category 1
(1)Sub 1
(35)Sub 2
(4)Sub 3
Main Category 2
(1)Sub 1
(35)Sub 2
(4)Sub 3
And so on
I get a list of each main catogroy in the DB form a different table and loop through
$get_cats = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM main_cats")or die(mysql_error());
//loop through each
while($main_cat = mysql_fetch_assoc($get_cats)){
//count main cat in products
$check = mysql_real_escape_string($main_cat['cat']);
$p_main_count = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM products WHERE cats = '$check' ORDER BY cats")or die(mysql_error());
//this would get an array of each product that has that main category
}
This looks all well and good but I can't think of a way how to display the data in the format I need it.
The products table has 3 main columns for this:
type
cats (main category)
sub cats (contains string 1,2,4 of multiple sub categorys)
Is there a way selecting and groups each main category and then displaying and counting the sub category's for each main category.

Answer 1

W3Schools has a really good tutorial for counting and displaying MySql Database entries. Here's a snippet of how you could try to display the Data in a table.
<?php
$con=mysqli_connect("example.com","peter","abc123","my_db");
// Check connection
if (mysqli_connect_errno())
{
echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
}
$result = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT * FROM main_cats");
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result))
{
echo $row['type'] . " " . $row['cats'] . " " . $row['subcats'];
echo "<br>";
}
?>
Lets say row 1 has the data Type: 1 Cats: 2 SubCats: 3
and row 2 has the data Type:2 Cats: 4 SubCats: 6
This would output the data like this
1 2 3
2 4 6
You can easily use the tables from HTML to make this look alot nicer.
echo "<table border="1">";
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result))
{
echo "<tr><td>" . $row['type'] . "</td><td> " . $row['cats'] . "</td><td> " . $row['subcats'] . "</td>";
echo "</tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
This would output in the same order but in a table.
Hope this helps. Also if you want any good references http://w3schools.com is a very good website.