Showing lists by state

[Hollywood21]

I need to pull out a large list of companies out of a database for display on the web. They are listed by state, and I can sort them by state, but I need to show the state name as a heading above each state's list. How do I accomplish that?

[coopster]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Hollywood21.

Well, your SELECT statement might look something like this ...

SELECT stateName, companyName FROM myTable ORDER BY stateName, companyName

... and then you will fetch your rows from the result set and every time the stateName changes you can print out a header using the value in that column.

[Hollywood21]

That works. Next I need to add a heading above each state though -- for example:

California

Companyname 1
Companyname 2
Companyname 3

[coopster]

Yep, so while you are looping through your result set, compare the value in the fetched row with a "holder" field that contains the last value you read in. If it is different, print out your header. Some pseudocode to demonstrate ...

$stateName = false; // initialize 
while ($row = fetching rows from database) { 
 if ($row['stateName']!== $stateName) { 
  $stateName = $row['stateName']; 
  print '<h2>' . htmlentities($stateName) . '</h2>'; 
 } 
 // print out your company stuff 
}

[Hollywood21]

That did the trick! Thank you!