Defining HTML tables within PHP - php

Question

I'm trying to get an HTML Table output in to a specific format via PHP after it grabs information from a MySQL Database.
In HTML, I can do this:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="list">
<tr>
<td style="cursor:hand" onclick="window.location.href = 'page.php?presenter=Name1'">Name1</td>
<td style="cursor:hand" onclick="window.location.href = 'page.php?presenter=Name2'">Name2</td>
<td style="cursor:hand" onclick="window.location.href = 'page.php?presenter=Name3'">Name3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="cursor:hand" onclick="window.location.href = 'page.php?presenter=Name4'">Name4</td>
<td style="cursor:hand" onclick="window.location.href = 'page.php?presenter=Name5'">Name5</td>
<td style="cursor:hand" onclick="window.location.href = 'page.php?presenter=Name6'">Name6</td>
</table>
This works great and looks nice, I have it DIV'd up and formatting nicely.
However, I need to do this by pulling down the names from MySQL and then creating a new cell when needed, then after 3 cells, create a new row.
So far, I have this:
<?php
//PRESENTERS HERE
/* connect to the db */
$connection = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
mysql_select_db($db, $connection);
/* show tables */
$result = mysql_query('SHOW TABLES', $connection) or die('cannot show tables');
echo '<h1>Presenters:</h1>';
while ($tableName = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
$table = 'presenters';
/* Get the presenters*/
$result2 = mysql_query('SELECT presenter FROM ' . $table) or die('cannot show data from ' . $table);
}
if (mysql_num_rows($result2))
{
echo '<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="list">';
while ($row1 = mysql_fetch_row($result2))
{
echo '<tr>';
foreach ($row1 as $key => $value)
{
echo '<td style="cursor:hand" onclick=\"window.location.href = \'page.php?presenter=' . $value . '">', $value, '</td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table><br />';
}
?>
But I'm unable to figure out how to get it to behave like the HTML one above. I also can't get the on click events to work.
The PHP form ends up with all entries on a row each, instead of three to a row.

Answer 1

Ahhh I see your problem for the entries in 3 rows and not one.
while($row1 = mysql_fetch_row($result2)) {
echo '<tr>';
foreach($row1 as $key=>$value) {
echo '<td style="cursor:hand" onclick=\"window.location.href = \'page.php?presenter='.$value.'">',$value,'</td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table><br />';
}
Because each time you retrieve something from the database (your while loop statement) you are opening and closing rows in the table.
You need to have a counter started outside the while loop which counts how many rows you have and when you get to the number of columns you want, reset the counter and close off the table tags.
Something like this:
$columncount = 0;
while($row1 = mysql_fetch_row($result2)){
if($columncount == 0){
echo "<tr>";
}
foreach($row1 as $key=>$value) {
echo '<td style="cursor:hand" onclick=\"window.location.href = \'page.php?presenter='.$value.'">',$value,'</td>';
}
$coloumncount ++;
//assuming you want 3 columns in your table
if($columncount == 3) {
echo "</tr>";
$coloumncount = 0;
}
}
Won't solve your onclick events but it will format the table.
Good luck!

Answer 2

Is the first quote for the onclick attribute accidentally getting escaped on this line?
echo '<td style="cursor:hand" onclick=\"window.location.href = \'page.php?presenter='.$value.'">',$value,'</td>';
You're also using different CSS classes between your example static HTML, and the generated HTML in your PHP sample (class="list" vs. class="db-table").