Group mysql results by category and display them into groups under each category

Question

I am trying to create a simple css menu that gets the data from a mysql table.

My idea is to have menu like this

    Category 1
    - link 1
    - li         


        

Answer 1

SQL GROUP BY statement groups the results so that only one row is returned for each category. This is typically used in conjunction with an aggregate function like count(), to count how many items are in each category. What you need is an either ORDER BY as GhostGambler said, or a separate query for each category as shown bellow. However as you only seem to have 2 categories, this approach seems unnecessarily complicated.

 $q=$db->query("SELECT DISTINCT category FROM content ORDER BY category");
 foreach($q as $cat){
    echo '
';  
    echo ''.$cat['category'].''; 
    echo '
';
    $linkq=$db->query("SELECT * FROM content WHERE category='" . $cat['category'] . "'"); 
    foreach($linkq as $link){
       echo '
'.$link['menu_name'].'
';
    }
    echo '
';
 }