ideal method of building tables in PHP - php

Question

As an intern I realized that I spend the bulk of my time building and manipulating tables from sql queries in PHP. My current method is to use two foreach loops:
foreach($query as $record){
foreach($record as $field => $value){
*Things that need to be done on each field-value pair*
}
*Things that need to be done on each row*
}
Is there a better way of doing this?
Also I tend to pack data together as a ~ separated list and store it in the server, is this a bad practice?
I'd rather put some code up for review but I don't want to risk exposing the internals of the company cod.

Answer 1

Foreach loops are the best way to iterate through your data. If you are looking to make your code a bit prettier, try using the ternary version
<?php foreach($query as $record) : ?>
<?php foreach($record as $field => $value) : ?>
*Things that need to be done on each field-value pair*
<?php endforeach; ?>
*Things that need to be done on each row*
<?php endforeach; ?>
Also, like mentioned in the comments above, you lose a lot of functionality when storing ~ seperated data in the db. If you must do this, you can try storing serialized objects instead of delimited strings. You can manipulate the objects in a number of ways such as json_encode() and json_decode()
$myArray = array();
$myArray['User1']['book'] = 'Pride and Prejudice';
$myArray['User1']['favorites'] = 'Water skiing';
$myArray['User2']['book'] = 'Mansfield Park';
$myArray['User2']['favorites'] = array('skateboarding', 'surfing', 'running');
$myArray['description'] = 'Things people like.';
echo '<pre>';
print_r(json_encode($myArray)); //This will convert your array to a string for the db
echo '</pre>';
echo '<pre>';
$myArrayString = json_encode($myArray);
print_r(json_decode($myArrayString)); //This will convert the db string to an object for manipulation
echo '</pre>';

Answer 2

There is no built in way to produce a HTML table from the result of a query. If you find yourself writing that sort of code over and over, then it would be a good candidate to make a reusable class or library. For example:
$table = new HTMLTable();
$table->setData($data);
echo $table->toHTML();
The above is not working code, just an example of how you could create reusable code instead of repeating the same table building code many times.

Answer 3

I tend to use a while loop with one of the mysql_fetch_.. functions. But essentially it's the same as what you do.
$query = 'SELECT
stuff
FROM
table';
if ($query = mysql_query($query)) {
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {
foreach ($row as $key => $value) {
/* Things that need to be done on each field-value pair */
}
/* Things that need to be done on each row */
}
}
And as to the ~ separated list. I strongly recommend to save the data in separate DB fields, instead of packing it like that. Just create a new table for each such pack.