A better way to display this data from MySql using php - php

Question

I currently have data like this in a table:
id | type
------------
1 | 1
2 | 1
3 | 2
4 | 2
5 | 3
6 | 3
6 | 3
I need to display data like this:
Type 1
--All type ones go here
Type 2
-- All type twos go here
Type 3
All type threes go here
The way I do it right now is by using two separate sql statements and loops.
select distinct type as type from table
while()
{
select type from table where type = type;
while()
{
}
}
Is there a better way to do this and get the results I want, or is using two loops the only way?

Answer 1

Change your query so that you are using ORDER BY type ASC.
Loop through the results, build an associative array where the key is the type, and the values are the ids.
Now you only have one loop, and ids can be accessed by their type from the associative array. It should be trivial to loop through the array by the key, and then show all the ids for that key.

Answer 2

Just select everything, and check whenever you hit a new type. This allows you to list everything out in O(n) time using only one query.
$result = mysql_query('SELECT id, type FROM table ORDER BY type ASC');
$type = 0;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result) {
if ($type != $row['type']) {
// New type found
$type = $row['type'];
echo "Type " + $row['type'] + "\n";
}
echo "-- " + $row['id'] + "\n";
}
This would give you an output like this
Type 1
-- 1
-- 2
Type 2
-- 3
-- 4
Type 3
-- 5
-- 6
-- 7

Answer 3

Use GROUP_CONCAT() with GROUP BY:
SELECT
`type`,
GROUP_CONCAT(`id` SEPARATOR ',') as `ids`
FROM
`table`
GROUP BY
`type`
ORDER BY
`type`;
In each cycle iteration, $row['ids'] might be explode()d, like:
<?php
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()){
$ids = explode(',', $row['ids']);
echo 'Type ', $row['type'], PHP_EOL;
if(empty($ids))continue;
foreach($ids as $id){
echo $id, ' ';
}
echo PHP_EOL;
}
?>