Gather fields under category in loop

[bonnielass]

I have mysql table as following.

category
title
link

and I wish to loop them sorted by category and then title asc. Is it possible to echo the category field only once and gather title and link under it?

I guess I could do a loop for each category by sorting each in their own sql-query like: "SELECT category, title, link from TABLE order by category asc, title ASC WHERE category =bananas" but is there a more elegant way of doing it without splitting categories in different sql-queries?

[dlite922]

Not sure what you want to do still.

Give us an example of the output you expect.






Dan

[bonnielass]

I'll try to clarify.

If, let's say, I have db as following:

fields: country, name.
inputs: Sweden, David Davidson
Sweden, Curt Curtson
Norway, Hugo Hugoson

And wish to have an output like this:

Sweden
David Davidson
Curt Curtson

Norway
Hugo Hugoson

If I echo in a loop now i get

Sweden
David Davidson
Sweden
Curt Curtson
Norway
Hugo Hugoson

and I dont want the country to be echoed for every row, only one time to create a heading for the other rows with the same country. I am an enthustiastic newbie and I might have missed something very obvious.

[zorgi]

Well for starter I recommend not to have all data in one table. In the example you gave us I would have minimum 2 tables.

Country
country_id
country_name

Person
person_id
country_id (FK)
person_name

Or to complete normalization i would have 3 tables:

Country
country_id
country_name

Country_x_Perso n
country_id (FK)
person_id(FK)

Person
person_id
person_name

Its simplified but gives you an idea. You should do some reading on database normalization

[bonnielass]

I suspected as much. Thank you!