Create Category Headings when displaying SQL data using PHP

Question

I have a menu for a website that I am pulling all of the information from a mySQL database. I am trying to find a way to sort the food into categories with headings.

They would be sorted like

Appetizers:

• Results display here

Salads:

• Results display here

And so on for a couple different categories. Here is my select statement

$sql = "SELECT item, price, description, category, picture, category_id FROM menu ORDER BY category ASC"; $new_result = mysql_query($sql);

And this is how I am importing the data using php

<?php while($new_row = mysql_fetch_array($new_result)) {
    if (isset($new_row["picture"])){
        echo "<div class='images'><img style='margin:15px;' src='".$new_row['picture']."' alt='".$new_row["item"]."' />
        <h2>". $new_row['item']."</h2>
          <h4>Price: ". $new_row['price']. " </h4>
          <p>Description: ". $new_row['description'] ."</p>
          <p>Category: ". $new_row['category'] ."</p></div>";}
 else {
    echo "<div class='images'><img style='margin:10px;' src='/archives/class11-lab/no.jpg' alt='Sorry, No Image Available' />
          <h2>". $new_row['item']."</h2><br>
           <h4>Price:". $new_row['price']. " </h4>            
        <p>Description: ". $new_row['description'] ."</h4>
         <p>Category: ". $new_row['category'] ."</p></div>";} } ?>

What I have here works perfectly fine, I just have no idea how to create headings to categorize the food types.

Thanks

Answer 1

Initialize a category variable before you start fetching rows.

$category = null;

After you fetch each row, compare that row's category to the previous category. If it's different, output the header. Then that category becomes the new previous category.

while ($new_row = mysql_fetch_array($new_result)) {
    if ($new_row['category'] != $category) {
        echo "<h1>$new_row[category]</h1>";
        $category = $new_row['category'];
    }
    // ... rest of your while loop contents ...

---

By the way, the mysql extension has been deprecated for quite a while and was removed in the current version of PHP. You should look into updating your code to use mysqli or PDO instead.