Pulling a survey with multiple answers from a database - php

Question

I have a working survey that pulls each question and any related answers from multiple tables. Each question is stored in the following table:
tblQuestions, with the fields:
qID
qText.
The related answers are stored in the table:
tblPossAnswers, with the fields:
aID
qID
answerText.
So, I would have 3 possible answers for each question. My sql to pull everything is:
select * from tblQuestions, tblPossAnswers where
tblPossAnswers.qID = tblQuestions.qID
order by tblQuestions.qID ASC
And my PHP to display it:
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo "<p>" . $row['qText'] . "</p><br />";
echo "<input type='radio' name='".$row['qID']."' value='".$row['aID']."' />";
echo $row['answerText'];
}
The problem is this is displaying the qText every time it displays a possible answer. So it looks like:
Question 1
Possible answer 1
Question 1
Possible answer 2
Question 1
Possible answer 3
Question 2
Possible answer 1
Question 2
Possible answer 2
Question 2
Possible answer 3
What I would like to do is have the qText only display when the first possible answer is pulled. I'm still somewhat of a newb to MySQL, so the solution might be something very simple that I'm just not seeing.

Answer 1

You can either test for whether the question has changed within your PHP loop:
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
if ($row['qID'] != $lastQuestionID) {
echo "<p>" . $row['qText'] . "</p><br />";
$lastQuestionID = $row['qID'];
}
echo "<input type='radio' name='".$row['qID']."' value='".$row['aID']."' />";
echo $row['answerText'];
}
Or else you can group the MySQL results by question using GROUP_CONCAT, specifying a separator on which you then split the answers in PHP:
select *, group_concat(answerText separator char(30)) as answers
from tblQuestions join tblPossAnswers using (qID)
group by tblQuestions.qID
order by tblQuestions.qID ASC
Then:
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo "<p>" . $row['qText'] . "</p><br />";
foreach (explode(chr(30), $row['answers']) as $answer) {
echo "<input type='radio' name='".$row['qID']."' value='".$answer."' />";
echo $answer;
}
}

Answer 2

No need to change anything in sql just change php slightly as following
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
if ($row['qText'] != $lastQuestion) {
echo "<p>" . $row['qText'] . "</p><br />";
$lastQuestion = $row['qText'];
}
echo "<input type='radio' name='".$row['qID']."' value='".$row['aID']."' />".$row['answerText'];
}