unknown columns, column names, and rows into HTML table - php

Question

I'm trying to display all the information in a msSQL table in an HTML table and have up with something that is not so great.
<table border="1">
<?
echo "<tr>";
for ($i = 0; $i < mssql_num_fields($result); ++$i){
echo "<th>" .$column_names[$i] . "</th>";
}
echo "</tr>";
$num_rows = mssql_num_rows($result);
for ($i = 0; $i < $num_rows; ++$i){
echo "<tr>";
foreach ($column_names as $key => $val){
$result_row = mssql_query("SELECT * FROM username WHERE id = '$i'");
$row = mssql_fetch_assoc($result_row);
echo "<td>";
echo $row[$val];
echo "</td>";
}
echo "</td>";
}
?>
</table>
This works. The first part prints out the column names successfully, but as for the rest:
1) I think it is sort of cumbersome to make a query for every time through the loop
2) it doesn't really work because the ids of the rows go much higher than the number of rows in the table, as some ids aren't used.
It seems like I should be able just make one query and pull everything from the database at one go, then build my HTML table from that, but I can't figure out how to access it row by row where I could go $row[next row][shifted value from $column_names. How can improve this query?

Answer 1

function table_cell($item, $header=false) {
if (!$item) return '';
$elemname = ($header) ? 'th' : 'td';
$escitem = htmlspecialchars($item, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');
return "<{$elemname}>{$escitem}</{$elemname}>";
}
function table_header_cell($item) {
return table_cell($item, true);
}
function table_row($items, $header=false) {
$func = ($header) ? 'table_header_cell' : 'table_cell';
return "<tr>\n\t".implode("\n\t", array_map($func, $items))."\n</tr>\n";
}
function echo_result_as_table($result) {
if ($result && $row = mssql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
$columnnames = array_keys($row);
echo "<table>\n", table_row($columnnames, true), "\n";
do {
echo table_row($row), "\n";
} while ($row = mssql_fetch_assoc($result));
echo "</table>\n";
}
}
$result = mssql_query("SELECT * FROM username");
echo_result_as_table($result);
if ($result) mssql_free_result($result);
If you have an array of associative arrays instead of a raw mssql result handle, you can use a function like this to produce a table string:
function array_to_table($arrayofassoc) {
if (!$arrayofassoc) return '';
$tablestr = '<table>';
$tablestr .= table_row(array_keys($arrayofassoc[0]), true);
$tablestr .= implode('', array_map('table_row', $arrayofassoc));
$tablestr .= '</table>';
return $tablestr;
}

Answer 2

try this:
while($row = mysql_fetch_results($result)){
echo '<td>'.$row['column_name'].'</td>';
}
with 'column_name' being the name of the column in mysql.
but some will say..."wait, but PDO"