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Weborum Webmaster Forum > TUTORIAL ARCHIVE - tutorials & scripts to save you scouring the internet. Please feel free to add your own. > PHP Tutorials & scripts

morrowasted

Jul 15 2004, 09:14 PM

I was recently presented with a problem of organizing data I retrieved from a database into a list. I thought for a while, came up with nothing, thought some more, came up with nothing again, asked nate... and of course, nate knew... I could use explode(). Of course, I was excited about using a function called "explode". But anyway. Explode takes a given string and creates an array of strings based on a character you tell it to use as a seperator. For example, if you exploded "I am cool/awesome/yousuck" and provided the character "/", it would seperate the 3 parts into an array $array[str1], etc.

Explode looks like this...

explode(seperator, string)

I am going to present you with a hypothetical situation... A school faculty site system that allows teachers to input the courses they teach, seperated by commas. These courses are stored in database in a field for retrieval at a later point in time. Now the object is to retrieve the information and organize it so that each course is a list item.

So first were going to query the database for the courses by the name of the teacher (which is in the url).

CODE

$query = "SELECT courses FROM facultysites WHERE name = '$name'";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

So what we have so far is an array of the courses taught by the teacher, stored in $row. Now we're going to explode the row courses....

CODE

$strsep = explode(",", $row['courses']);

and then we have the "title"...

CODE

echo "Courses taught by <b>" . $name . "</b>: ";

then we start the list...

CODE

echo "<ul style='margin-left:15px; color: #C60029;' type='square'>";

and now comes the moment of truth... we're going to run a foreach on the array $strsep. (and we also end the list)

CODE

foreach ($strsep as $course) {
echo "<li><span style='color:black;'>$course</span></li>";
}
echo "</ul>";

and now you have pimped out your database retrieval.

any questions? post em.

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