SQL Query for a one to many relationship - php

Question

I have two tables, Table A and Table B. For each record in table A there are many records in Table B; thus, a one to many relationship exists between tables A and B. I want to perform a query so that for each row returned from table A, all of the corresponding rows will be returned from table B. From what I understand I'll need to use a INNER Join - however, how would I go about accessing all of the returned rows through say, PHP?
$sql = "Select A.ID, B.Name * From A INNER JOIN B ON A.ID = B.ID";
A.ID | B.fName | B.lName
1 nameone lnameone
1 nametwo lnametwo
2 namethree lnamethree
4 namefour lnamefour
Now that I have the above results, I want to use PHP to loop through all of the values of B.Name only for a single A.ID at a time. So, the results I want would look like:
1.
nameOne lNameOne
nameTwo lnametwo
2. namethree lNamethree
4. nameFour lNameFour
Basically, I'm trying to group the query results by the ID in table A.
I appreciate the help very much!
Thank you,
Evan

Answer 1

You could just Google "php get from database," and use some normal array pre-processing, but I worry the advice you find may not be ideal. Here's what I'd do:
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=host;dbname=dbname', 'user', 'pass');
$result = $pdo->query(<<<SQL
SELECT
ID,
Name
FROM
A
-- Alternative to `JOIN B USING(ID)` or `JOIN B ON (A.ID = B.ID)
NATURAL JOIN B
SQL
);
$a = array();
while ($row = $result->fetch()) {
if (!isset($a[$row['ID']]) {
$a[$row['ID']] = array();
}
$a[$row['ID']][] = $row['Name'];
}
You could also GROUP BY the ID and GROUP_CONCAT the names to be exploded in PHP later to skip the manual array creation and reduce some iteration (although SQL will do more in that case).

Answer 2

Adding a simple ORDER BY A.ID to the SQL query would probably get you quite far in "grouping" the items together. It's difficult to give a more detailed answer without knowing exactly what you want to do with the "groups".